Artist Name»
Press Exhibition
Date
26/02/2010
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DREAMINESS IS characteristic of Claire Carpenter’s paintings at the Cross Gallery as well. They are small in scale and made with thin layers of tempera on gesso. Images emerge from successive washes of colour, often applied very freely, so that it seems they might dissolve completely in waves of pigment. Yet they don’t, because Carpenter likes to pin her images down in an almost photographic way – that is, despite the free brushwork, with a few notable exceptions, there’s not much expressive distortion when she actually zeroes in on representational content. In terms of visual description she mostly retains her objectivity.
Taken collectively, her work suggests something like a dream diary, though the show’s accompanying note, describing it as “fantasy and recollection”, also seems reasonable. An air of mystery pervades as we glimpse scenes involving figures in different interior and exterior settings.
Murder at Swan Lake , as the title implies, features a ballet scene, overwritten by violent scratches. In Blue house longing the house is there as a tiny motif, in a different register to the turbulent image of two embracing figures. It is very much “as if each brush stroke hides a dark secret.”
Downstairs at the Cross, in Nag, Peter Burns shows paintings under the title The Wayfarer . A recent MA graduate from NCAD, Burns makes clotted, densely worked little compositions, stocked with references that are for the most part self explanatory. If memory serves, his student work inclined towards inventively re-stating iconic images and figures. Here too he revisits subjects including “myths, Biblical stories, art historical, literary and musical themes”. The show’s title comes from Hieronymous Bosch, evoking the idea of a traveler in search of something undefined.
While the paintings are almost sculptural in the rugged density of their textures, Burns has a light touch. His Young tiger hunting wildfowl is a case in point, a radiant fantasy that has a touch of magic about it. While the admission of doubt in Little bird (probably more like a duck) is very likeable. He simplifies images in a cartoonish way, but not at all awkwardly. There’s real elegance to what he does, just as his inclination towards heightened colour doesn’t contradict the fact that he has really good colour sense.
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