Summer 2005 - Limerick: Mark O'Kelly at Limerick City Gallery of Art
CIRCA 112 review  | | Mark O'Kelly: Kandalama , 2005, oil on linen; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery | Mark O'Kelly's oeuvre to date has been a carefully considered developmental series of works, a feature particularly evident at his recent exhibition, In Fashion , at the Limerick City Gallery of Art. Here groups of works were clearly defined per previous exhibitions: series of paintings were distinguished from each other by the gallery's six ground-floor exhibition spaces. If you moved from left to right through the Gallery, this facilitated a sense of walking through the progression of his pictorial language over the last seven years or so. The sequence was occasionally disturbed by the placement of works out of strict chronological order - a reminder to the viewer of the overall cohesion within O'Kelly's ongoing painted world. The work comprises an impressively eclectic mix of imagery confined by a largely political interest in the connotations of the aesthetic interchange between art and design, and many threads of common subject matter are apparent between the groupings of works. O'Kelly, who shows at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin, has an indisputable versatility with regard to representational painting: he has painted cityscapes, close-ups of forest foliage, crowd scenes, life-portraits, interiors and even still-lives. However, the key to the derivational core of his works is contained within the earlier paintings shown at Limerick. The intense formal concerns of his abstract works from the late 1990s, for example Mir , 1998, which explores the structure of a painting, has remained at the heart of his work. Though he now 'uses' popular media imagery, such as magazine photographs, he autographs them through a process of manipulation. In the process of synthesizing the final pictorial outcome, O'Kelly evidently has a long, lingering engagement with his canvases, refining the individual compositional construction of each image. Underneath - or maybe on the surface of - all the complex and overlapping ideological impulses behind his works, a painterly assurance is paramount. Muted tones, frozen actions, jagged angles, bare canvas and obvious brushstrokes combine to remind the viewer that the images are painted surfaces, first and last. The tension in Clock , 2001, indicates in a condensed manner a tension permeating many of the works. A general atmosphere of anxiety was undeniable throughout the exhibition and seemed to climax in the more recent works. An alert paranoia pervades New Amsterdam , 2004, a seated crowd at a fashion show; Parade , 2004, is a grim-looking march of what could equally be displaced young refugee women as top models. The models in Yamamoto , 2005, Ghesquiere , 2005, Balenciaga , 2005, Cristobel , 2005, and Yoghji , 2004, are exquisitely painted and presented solo in indefinite contexts evocative of catwalks. Somehow, the dour pouts of these physically self-possessed women make them seem ambiguously sinister and paradoxically vulnerable. The seduction of the sheer opulence of the glamour world becomes, in part, compromised by the various contemporary militaristic implications lurking behind the examples chosen by O'Kelly. The generic grid quality of the urban scenes, from Bellevue , 2002, to Johannesburg , 2005, suggests a disquieting western homogeny of modern architectural space. Ominous-looking buildings and their vying relationship with nature play a vital part in perpetuating O'Kelly's unsettling vision. His viewpoint continues to move from interiors to exteriors, include particular representations and unspecified locations, in order to question the links between people and the commercial centres they create, and all the historical intercultural baggage that attends these links.  | | Mark O'Kelly: New Amsterdam , 2004, oil on linen; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery | These works are not easily read. Uncertainty about what has happened, what may happen and the undisclosed significance of the places, times and situations in O'Kelly's works leave the viewer to consider and reconsider the paintings, and furthermore to reconstitute the interrelationships among them, of which there are many. In Limerick, this rewarding possibility was encouraged by the scale and range of the exhibition. A profoundly thoughtful artist, O'Kelly's insatiable research practice ensures that the final products that hang on the wall are deceptively still. Each painting contains a myriad of ideas and celebrates a pleasure in paint, while in exhibition, as a series of representations, they are anything but straightforward. Niamh Ann Kelly is an art writer and lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology.
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