The odd couple

Although it seems a strange idea to pair artists Patrick Fitzgerald and Ronnie Hughes for this joint show, the contrast between the two highlights different aspects of their works.
By Billy LeahyPatrick Michael Fitzgerald has reclusive tendencies. The Cork-born artist has been living in near isolation in the Basque county for the last sixteen years. He is rarely interviewed, and when he does speak about his work, it is usually in conversation with another handpicked artist whose work is of interest to him.
Painter Sean Shanahan was the interviewer, for instance, back in 2002 when Fitzgerald was preparing his first solo show at the Rubicon gallery on St Stephen's Green. During their conversation, Fitzgerald hinted at his reason for this quasi-silence, explaining that what “a good painter has to say should be said in the paintings.”
The 2002 show, entitled The Morning Hours, was a homecoming exhibition of sorts, with Fitzgerald having first abandoned his native Cork for the Chelsea School of Art in London before settling close to Bilbao in Northern Spain. For this “return” show, Fitzgerald produced quite formal and geometric structures on PMF board with corners lobbed off and holes, slashes and gashes bored into the surface.
Back then, it might have been difficult to imagine him sharing an exhibition with Ronnie Hughes. The two would have been odd bedfellows, with perhaps just the birth-year of 1965 and the medium of abstraction in common, but four years later their work sits comfortably side-by-side on the walls of the Rubicon space which represents them both.
There seems to be two common threads running through the eleven works of Sligo-based Hughes, and the six tableaux of Fitzgerald that comprise the intriguingly titled exhibition, Synecdoche. The first is a visual similarity of sorts – the synthetic element, which is present in the unusual aesthetic of Fitzgerald's soft and glossy panels and also in the artificial motifs and shapes that appear in Hughes' work.
These synthetic shapes, however, seem to be abstracted and mutated organic structures, with Hughes explaining how his recent work can be viewed as a plethora of “corrupted” abstractions that meander through various modes of representation. These modes include references such as debased scientific diagrams which are mixed with cartoonesque anatomical motifs, to create an amalgam that the artist humorously hopes will find “curious viewers for long-term relationships.”
This element of nature – although perhaps not Hughes' humour – is present in Fitzgerald's work, with the artist admitting “more organic tree-like structures” appear in his recent paintings. This blend of the natural and man-made joins the two artists' work, while on a more conceptual level they both accept and welcome the impact of the outside world on their art.
The second element is probably the strongest link between Fitzgerald and Hughes. The former believes his paintings are formed by “an almost subterranean interplay of references” and has previously stated how influences cannot be ignored when he approaches the easel, especially those of art history. Hughes expresses a similar will to assimilate and funnel a natural element into his work, claiming he expresses “a distillation of the artists experience in, and of, nature” in his paintings.
Both artists have enjoyed successful solo exhibitions in recent years and so it seems an odd idea to pair them up for a joint show – and perhaps Fitzgerald loses most from this decision. His paintings are all worked on concurrently and benefit from being hung together as this highlights the painterly dynamics and range of forms they possess. This is pretty much admitted in the arrangement of Synecdoche, where five of his six works are hung side-by-side, creating a kind of “Fitzgerald island” in the middle of Hughes' paintings. This division perhaps undermines Synecdoche as a joint exhibition, but the positive effect of this is that the contrast between the two artists highlights different aspects of their works to those accentuated by their similarities.
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