IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
MARTIN GALE'S RURAL PAINTINGS BY AIDAN DUNNE
*Aidan Dunne is art critic for In Dublin magazine
The spectre of photography haunts Martin Gales paintings. On the one hand they employ photography as a useful tool in the role of recording information, while on the other they vie with it in the extent. of their verisimilitude.
Many 'New Realist' "painters like Robert Ballagh go beyond photograaphic realism in their work. No photoograph, they might argue, is as compreehensively detailed as any painting of theirs, or as consciously organised. But it is photography that dictates the scope of any realist painting today. Photography is the rival and the yarddstick. Painters may not like this state of affairs, but they have learned to live with it.
Martin Gale makes meticulous, obbsessivelydetailed paintings that are exxclusively concerned with domestic life. They suggest a view of rural living in which the two greatest virtues are work and domesticity. It is a. world in which there is no great urgency. The people in his paintings, his family and friends, are usually depicted waiting around, or walking, or in some way casually caught in the frame of the piccture.
While it is a world free of urgency, of that. specific form of pressure at" tributable to the pace of urban living, it does admit a certain unease. There is always something, some detail of colour or attitude, that jars just a little bit. And we feel that something isn't quite right.
Gale didnt immediately find his now familiar rural world. While a student at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, he produced work that contained surrealist underrtones. Not the flamboyant fantasies of a Dali, for Gale never was and proobably never will be flamboyant. He innclined more to the jarring note, the flawin the seam of convention.
His paintings at the time (late sixxties and early seventies) wereno! as patiently conceived and made as his work is now. He compromised, Instead of" every blade of grass, every branch on the bush, .he situated enigmatic figures, animal .and human, on miniimally detailed flat grounds of green and blue. The green and blue has stayyed, but in the interim it has taken shape and gained a whole new wealth of subtlety, The figures - a startling looking owl was a recurrent motiffwere assiduously detailed and vaguely threatening, regarding the spectator balefully and directly,
At this stage Gale could have gone in any M several directions. He could plausibly have followed Colin Harrison into a world of fragments, tense with surrealist unease. Their work does share common qualities, but Gale could not match Harrison's skill as a draftsman.
In the event, instead of pursuing surrealist e.ffects, he consolidated and expanded the realist base of his picctures. With an enormous investment of time and energy, he discovered the way that he actually wanted to . make pictures. The work became. less rather than more fragmented. Those blank, open backgrounds gained depth and precision.
As Gale spent-more and more time on a single work, the instant of time the work described became more sharrply defined, like a snapshot. Other things happened. Although his subbject matter became more prosaic, cerrtain characteristics unexpectedly enndured. The vague air of unease carried over, and it became more difficult to pin down its source. The atmosphere of his paintings, always distinctive, remained very much the same.
What of the atmosphere? Sombre, definitely Irish, autumnal. A feeling for rain sodden air and earth. A disstance from the subject that amounts to, remoteness - though Gale is in his latest paintings closing in, putting people in the foreground. There are variations on a palette that remains basically the same: blue, green and earth colours, enlivened by splashes of primary red or yellow.
It can be argued that Gale's painttings are like domestic snapshots given monumental treatment. That the artist is devoted to preserving the moment and celebrating the value of ordinary things. Gale is not half as facile as such a reading might suggest. The paintings simply are not wide-eyed appreciations of the wonders of nature. The overrcast sky, the broken panes in the greenhouse, the stubborn intractability of objects that is suggested, all consspire to ridicule such naive notions. The world that he depicts is a place that is lived in, with all the usual difficulties, not idly perceived. He wants someething more real than a photograph, some process equal to the cornplication of his own perceptions, that will not only relay the information but also demonstrate why it is valuable, why the moment matters.
At their best, his paintings are full of mystery. The mystery of a single moment that contains a bewildering wealth of impressions. The mystery of an action caught out of context and left undefined and ambiguous. The mystery of a visual richness that overrwhelms the observer. Gale aspires to describe what is exceptional in everyything we take to be ordinary.
His early surrealist inclination has been channelled to this end, to find the extraordinary in the prosaic. •
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"Family and Friends", an exhibition of paintings by Martin Gale organiised by the Arts Council, is on show at the Modern Gallery in Kilkenny Castle until March 7, after which it will tour the country, showing in venues at Cork, Wexford, Sligo, Galway, Tuam, Tralee and Limerick.
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