En Direct de Dublin presented by Kevin Kavanagh

Michael Boran, Margaret Corcoran, Gary Coyle, Stephen Loughman, Paul Nugent, Mark O'Kelly

13/05/2003 - 14/08/2003

The Centre Culturel Irlandais and Kevin Kavanagh are pleased to present the work of six contemporary artists from Dublin.

The artists all graduated from the National College of Art and Design between the end of the Eighties and the beginning of the Nineties.

'The six artists included in this exhibition do not make up a group, but they do have certain things in common. In particular, they all have a critical and investigative attitude to modes of representation. All of their work is, to a greater or lesser extent, about how we look at and make sense of the world, especially the world as mediated through images. Often, they seem preoccupied by the limits of vision, by what cannot be seen. Our visual culture is dominated by photographic images in myriad forms, so it is hardly surprising that several of these artists refer to photographic codes of one sort or another.

Michael Boran and Gary Coyle actually make photographs, but you could say that both aim to circumvent conventional photographic practice. The former does so by setting out to capture the momentary imprint of fleeting events, aftermaths, empty spaces, things that, in a sense, the camera does not register. The latter, meanwhile, photographs vacated, marginal, urban spaces by night. These are anti-subjects as well, and charged with a slight unease. Previously Gary Coyle drew crime scenes from True Crime magazine, here he makes densely worked charcoal drawings of the sets of porn movies, pedestrian interiors imbued with an odd poignancy.

Stephen Loughman's forensic examination of an entirely conventional apartment also engenders something like unease as we are forced to ask ourselves: What is he looking for? What he is looking for turns out to be the unsettling strangeness of the ordinary. Something of the same applies to Mark O'Kelly's cool treatment of urban imagery drawn from a variety of sources: a fragmented and fabricated world subjected to fabricated modes of perception, yet unified in the materiality of the painted surface.

Margaret Corcoran's An Enquiry follows the progress of a young girl surveying some of the paintings that form the Milltown Bequest to the National Gallery of Ireland. Corcoran frames typical image from the Romantic era with calculated dispassion. One of the implications is that our ways of looking at and making images are always highly structured. In her images one set of pictorial conventions frames another. Paul Nugent's work is about what we do not or cannot see in painting. In his paintings, meticulously planned and constructed images are concealed beneath layers of a single colour, where they assume a ghostly, spectral and at times unsettling presence. There is, his work intimates, always more going on than meets the eye, something that holds true for everything in this exhibition.'

Aidan Dunne 2003

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