Looking to the Futures

The RHA begins its series of solo exhibitions by Futures artists with a strong show by Stephen Brandes

When the Royal Hibernian Academy announced last year that the excellent annual Futures exhibition would be taking a voluntary five-year hiatus, it seemed like astonishingly disappointing news for the younger generation of Irish artists. To mark the end of the project's first run, the Academy called back all the participants from the previous four years for a 'best of' group show, which underlined the strength of the Futures idea and made it all the more lamentable that the next instalment would not arrive until 2010.

The RHA, however, were not about to let a good idea drop and announced that from 2006, a selection of the 27 artists that took part in Futures would be afforded a one-person exhibition at the gallery.

The first of the artists to be handed his chance is Stephen Brandes – and if the RHA were trying to convince any doubters about the merits of their post-Futures plan, the exhibition by Wolverhampton-born Brandes is a solid opening argument. Brandes' detailed, mainly permanent marker on vinyl, works, which will be familiar to any regular visitors to the Rubicon gallery on St Stephen's Green, are, in the larger space of the RHA, even more impressive.

Brandes' intricate illustrations, neatly executed sketchpad drawings and loosely painted oil on canvas works come close to producing a visual overload. The precision and intensity of his detail is akin to that of a compulsive doodler, with many pieces starting off as small motifs or designs before organically developing into something much larger indeed. Most of the works that comprise Klutz Paradiso, the title of the exhibition, find their source in his journey from Romania to England in 1999, when Brandes retraced the flight of his Jewish family in the early 20th century.

But Klutz Paradiso, although at times quite personal, is far from an illustration of this journey. In fact, visually, it seems to be located in industrial suburbia, the environs in which Brandes passed his childhood. The repetitive houses, 19th-century red-brick chimneys, steel pipes pumping out effluent, all seem to form an industrial dystopia. The human element is often reduced to speech bubbles emerging from houses; sometimes these form mini-dialogues, at others they are slightly obscure references appropriated from a variety of sources.

For instance, one work, 'Der Angstlustbaum', was inspired by Darwin's Tree of Evolution but prominently features a quote from English band The Fall.

The majority of works are drawn onto vinyl (or in common parlance linoleum), commonly with a faux-marble or parquet design. This use of Italianate flooring locates the works inside the middle-class suburbs Brandes meticulously draws, creating a clever element that references one of his main sources of inspiration.

Overall, and despite its substantial size – it is easy to lose oneself in just one of Brandes' drawings, never mind a whole exhibition – Klutz Paradiso is a well-constructed, amusing and captivating exhibition. The Irish art calendar may have lost a considerable highlight in Futures for the next few years, but if the portfolio of previous participants can continue to deliver such impressive solo shows (and this shouldn't be doubted) there will be plenty to soften the blow.