Irish Arts Review

Michael AshurAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), p. 66Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491993 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

EXHIBITIONS

Michael Ashur As a young artist, Michael Ashur's painting was very directly linked to the aesthetics and concerns of the sixties. In the age of astonishing achievements in space exploration and in scientific discovery and research, it was natural that artists should reflect such exploits in their work. Ashur's painting achieved a clever synthesis of crystalline struct ures pertaining to the infinitesimal units of physics which paradoxically and simultaneously related to the vastness of outer space and the appearance of galactic bodies. These concerns were painted in sharp, precise forms in delicate and translucent layers, in which the method of painting was itself akin to the crystalline structures represented.

The paintings were generally. on a large scale in a colour range of spatial blues and ice-tones, often in repetitive series, which again reflected the subject matter. They were in an area between abstract ion and figuration, an abstract realism, in which the realism of the forms was

magnified and abstracted from their habitual context and scale. It is several years now since Ashur has had a one man show and it will be interesting to see how his precision-painting has

weathered the onslaughts of New Ex pressionism when his work is exhibited at the end of June at the Hendriks Gallery, Dublin.

Dorothy Walker

Ciarain Lennon Ciar'an Lennon has been a lone, independent, and most interesting artist since the early seventies. His exhibition in May this year at Oliver Dowling's

Gallery was his first in Dublin in eight years. He is a thoughtful and serious artist, very much an artist of the seventies in a minimalist, reductivist style, with an elision of complexities in colour and media leading to a quiet, intense distillation of non-iconic issues.

He is in the stream of Sean Scully and Patrick Ireland in his recent drawings and paintings, relying on taut distinct ions of colour, or on the minute shifts of plane between oil-on-paper and oil on-tape-on-paper.

These paintings are the antithesis of recent Expressionist painting and one

Michael Ashur, Emerald Time Crystal Disintegration, 268 x 184 cms.

Acrylic on canvas.

has to change down to an altogether quieter gear to be able to receive them. This does not mean that they are in any way less forceful. On the contrary, their means are so minimal that they must be correspondingly intense; they borrow no support from popular iconography. They rely on the integrity of the painted surface and its capacity to communicate the intention of the artist. Such integ rity and capacity are very strongly present in the works but it is up to the spectator to look quietly for long enough to apprehend these emanations. They come on slowly.

The paintings are a form of minimal

baroque, using the term 'baroque' in its

musical rather than its architectural connotation, although once through the barrier of visual silence implicit in their quietness, the minimal means employed, such as the combination of graphite and black oil paint, are baroquely rich in themselves.

Lennon's work has always kept close to the bone of either painterly or archi tectural expression. One of his first one-man shows in the old Projects Arts Centre in South King St in the early seventies, was an installation piece in

which a painted canvas was drawn off the top of a folded pile of canvas some five or six feet high, and pinned along several metres of wall, leaving the spectator to suppose that the entire pile was likewise painted, and pointing up the communicative importance of the act of painting, whatever the subject matter. More distinctly architectural installations were those in the Arts

Council Gallery, Belfast, involving a sophisticated play of long horizontal slits of natural light in a rectangular gallery space; and in the exhibition 'Without the Walls' in the ICA,

London, where he integrated the exter ior and interior of the building, bringing in the pedestrians on the pavement out side by means of reflection and colour emphasis on certain architectural char acteristics of the gallery, means which were entirely quiet, subtle, indeed hardly noticeable. Other installations pertaining to illusion and the role of the spectator in art were 'Veil' in the

Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, where the public in one half of the gallery were seen through a gridded mesh screen, formalizing and distancing their images,

while a sound system was contrived to amplify their footsteps, bringing them nearer in sound but farther away visually. And a piece utilizing the reflective qualities of the Miesian bronze and glass building of the Bank of Ireland Headquarters in Baggot St,

Dublin, to create a pictorial 'ground' or picture plane for the reflected images of the passers-by.

Lennon is not an artist to toss off easy reactions to his daily life. His work is deeply reflective and thoughtful, in that respect not unlike the work of James Coleman, with whom he has collaborated, although the aesthetic end-result is very different.

One of his drawings, 'Newgrange Drawing' illustrates tellingly his turn of metaphor and his aesthetic distinction: the dark oil-on-paper is intermittently pierced by horizontal threads of light penetrating the darkness. There is no need to dramatize the already mythical happening at Newgrange which has occurred at the winter solstice every year for the last five thousand years. Lennon's distillation of the poetic fertility rite of sun and earth retains the

mystery of the Stone Age event, un knowable to us except through its

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