Robert Ballagh: upstairs, downstairs
The reader of Joyce visiting Dublin for the first time will know what to look for: the river, the National Library, the Bailey or the tower in Sandymount. Similarly, the visitor to Robert Ballagh's house will be watching out for the key items that appear in his autobiographical paintings. There will have to be an upstairs and a downstairs in his house: the paintings say so. There will have to be a spiral staircase in his house: it runs through two of the paintings like the Liffey through "Finnegans Wake". There will have been some recent changes in the decor because one recent painting is called "After Modernisation". And if you look carefully you will see that the room in "Inside No 3" has been enlarged.
Two of these paintings "Upstairs No 3" and "After Modernisation" - comprise Ballagh's entire output for 1982; they took six months each to complete. He was enabled to turn down various commissions and paint what he pleased through his membership of Aosdana, which paid him £4,000 last year. They are the centrepieces of his recent exhibition in the Hendriks Gallery in Dublin. The other three main works on show are commissioned portraits. One is of Charles Haughey at the 1980 Ard Fheis. Two are of rich families.
The paintings of the rich families remain puzzling. Particularly in the painting of the Downes family we have a portrait of a man with his family and his property. It is the type of portrait John Berger describes in "Ways of Seeing" which confirms the sitters' own view of themselves, which sets them beyond any possible equality with the mass of their fellow humans. As a socialist and a fan of John Berger it is possible that Robert Ballagh's intention in these two portraits and in the one of Charles Haughey is ironic. It is possible he has his tongue in his cheek.
He denies this, however. He talks about Goya's portraits of the Spanish court, how they tell us more than the history books. He asserts that these portraits "tell the truth about the Irish bourgeoisie". He walks a tightrope, he says, between satisfying the commission and telling the truth. He likes the portraits: "In their own quiet way, I think they're quite interesting pictures."
"They're all simply means to communicate. I'm an image-maker," he says of his paintings. He does not see paint or the creation of texture as the whole point of painting. He wants to make meaning. He wants to make statements. He would question the significance of the type of painting that is done for its own sake. He is not in love with paint.
Ballagh would go on from this point to question the whole modern tradition in painting. "Modernism seems to be the mainstream but it is a cul de sac," he says. He wants to "re-connect with a tradition that's always here." He is concerned with the relationship between the artist and society; he is concerned that the messages he sends in his paintings should be relevant and understandable. He is against abstraction.
He talks about "Upstairs No 3". "I had a lot to say in that picture," he says. He had done one painting of his wife descending the staircase naked and had an idea for a companion piece. "It became embarrassingly obvious that it had to be a male nude and it had to be me," he says.
He began by shooting off 40 or 50 photographs and then worked to scale on a drawing board just as an architect would — Ballagh is a trained architect — before he started to paint. Why does he have helicopters in the painting? He says that helicopters often pass from Mountjoy to the Special Criminal Court; he can see them from his window. He also talks about American foreign policy. He refers to his worry about American foreign policy in his painting. He also wants to comment on Western eroticism as compared to that of the East, to subvert the tradition of the nude in Western painting.
Ballagh holds a unique position in Irish art. His paintings are comments, clever asides, ironic sermons, pamphlets, addresses to the nation, personal statements on Irish society, his role in that society as artist and man; on art history, his role as an artist within a tradition. He makes images rather than paintings; the images, at times, lack the subtlety and complexity that hard-edged pictures such as his require to be totally successful. His messages are often too literal and simple. They wear their meaning on their sleeve. They reflect, though, what Ballagh wants them to reflect. "I'm that kind of painter because of the political and philosophical views I hold."