Michael Mulcahy: Images of the Navigator

Last year's exhibition of paintings by Michael Mulcahy at the Lincoln Gallery was a patchy affair, consising of a handful of large pictures which had bold, direct magic, and others that were less penetrating. One felt that Mulcahy was not really in command of his talent, that he was a prolific painter who was occasionally seized by a spirit and moved by it. When the spirit chose to make an appearance the pictures hit their mark; when the artist himself tried to summon inspiration, the mastery was gone.

Since then Mulcahy has learnt to control his pictorial vision more confidently. He spent the winter in a studio on the coast of West Cork, and became obsessed by the environment. The colours in his new paintings, which will be on show at the Project Art Gallery from June 10, under the thematic title of 'The Navigator', are generally more muted than before, grimmer in hue.

He was captured, he says, by the raw, harsh seascapes he gazed at from the studio window, and their effect on his work is profound. The pictures are rapidly painted; they are all surface, with dashes of pigment whipped against the canvas as though driven there by a cutting wind. They are more objective, more Irish, and above all more visionary than before. Mulcahy is no longer just plumbing the depths of his subconscious, he is learning to see with a third eye.

The concept that holds this series together is the sea. Mulcahy perceives it as a symbol of deep feeling, of expanses of unexplored space, and as the habitat of fish and fisherfolk. His 'Navigator' (above) is a seaman, and the personification of human adventurousness. In his painting of that name a white figure is shown in profile against dark, rank waters, with glowing rocks of fiery red and orange in the distance, like threatening beacons.

The picture is reminiscent of that icon of late Romanticism, Arnold Bocklin's 'Isle of the Dead', where a man in white is being ferried to a cavernous island of stone and cypresses. But whereas Bocklin's shrouded figure is bowed by oppression, Mulcahy's 'Navigator' is proud and defiant.

One of Mulcahy 's strengths is his sense of daring. That boldness is the subject of his large triptych, 'Curiosity didn't kill the cat'. The left panel, which shows a greyish head attached to a totem-like tree, refers to the Navigator, 'who knows he is going to die, but is not put off, because he realises that life begins and ends in darkness'. In the central piece a demonic figure, 'a bit of a trickster', is seen taking a leap upwards. 'He's accepting a risk. The more you risk, the more you gain'. The third, most powerful, panel shows a naked man, half covered by black and blue grass, striding purposefully into the darkness, 'like a tiger stalking his prey'.

With this acceptance of danger and the inevitability of death, the Navigator finds himself with the ability to see things that other people don't. As a visionary, he can contact the 'Vanishing Magician' a shadowy presence veiled under thin washes of paint ('I covered over a figure on an earlier canvas because I didn't like it, and it began to show through. 1 decided to do it deliberately in this painting. And I added the extra piece of canvas because it needed more space'.) He can also see the crucified man in 'Hiding'.

The Navigator is solitary, like the 'Mountainy Man' with the range of hills on his head. He has some of the aboriginal wildness of the man in 'Hungry Grass'. But under the hardy strength of the simple fisherman or peasant is a sense of foreboding that can be seen in their eyes. Mulcahy's pictures are strewn with the remains of Navigators who have been struck down in their quest.

There are, for instance, the bodiless heads of the Drowned Fisherman and the Abbot of Skellig Michael, and the nameless skull tossed aloft by a ferocious gale. And in the barely visible monster that swims just below the surface of the stormy sea in 'The Shadow', Mulcahy symbolises the black fear that every Navigator must face.

Mulcahy speaks of Van Gogh, Goya, Max Ernst, Beckmann, and Munch being his favourite painters, and their influence can be seen in his work. There are also similarities with the paintings of the Australian artist, Sidney Nolan.

Nonetheless, if there is a major weakness in Mulcahy's style, it is the limited nature of his formal vocabulary. He has forged a set of images for himself, which he continually rearranges in fresh contexts: the face in profile with the curious slanted eyes, the dark, devilish men, the shapeless trees, and the ubiquitous moons. His paintings can become repetitive.

But if he continues to develop his idiom, Mulcahy will become the most important Irish expressionist painter since Jack B. Yeats. His vision of Ireland, however, is far from the mists of the Celtic Twilight: it is more akin to the country in Werner Herzog's 'Heart of Glass'. Mulcahy's Ireland is a rugged, sublime landscape peopled by crazy saints and spaced-out demons, and surrounded by ferocious seas.