Un Salon par Mick O'Dea- Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris

Mick O'Dea

01/12/2006 - 12/01/2007

A Salon – a French tradition - is a place where people gather, where people are seen and see, discuss, agree and disagree; some official, some unofficial. On 30 November 2006, Mick O’Dea holds his Salon in the Centre Culturel Irlandais, with the difference being that his people are all in portraits, with their voices strong and compelling. The audience is invited to attend.

Another strong French tradition is portraiture – an exhibition of work by Ingres was a highlight of 2005 and the exhibition in the Grand Palais for Rentrée 2006 is ‘Portraits Public et Privé’. The formal portrait evokes the time, the place, and the personality. It becomes a tool to read the mores of the time. The commissioner is also a participant in the process, often unseen. It is with a nod to this grand French tradition that a chronicle of Irish people who passed through Paris and through the large doors of the old Collège des Irlandais, is an important historical marker, an important document for the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, Ireland’s first major cultural centre abroad, in the Samuel Beckett Centenary season. It also records the consolidation of this portal to Paris and Europe for contemporary Irish artists in many fields, who have come to make Paris their own, for longer or shorter periods, wholly in the Beckett mode of voluntary exile. It chronicles the new chapter in the story of the Irish College.

The invitation to make this chronicle was extended to artist Mick O’Dea, to be created in this space that is a mixture of both Ireland and France, the Centre Culturel Irlandais. The Irish have always been able to make new places their own. It is important for Ireland at home that the echoes from ‘abroad’ continue to sound, particularly from France. O’Dea’s Salon bears witness to the thriving friendship that is alive and well in Paris.

Another strong inspiration behind the invitation to O’Dea is the painting ‘l’Atelier du peintre’ by 19th century French painter Gustave Courbet*; the painter is surrounded on either side by personalities of the time, as he paints a nude subject, his back half turned to the audience. There are many keys to his defiance of the Salon system of the time in his painting, and with opposition to the idealism of portraiture and the aim to paint people with all their darkness and light. He also painted with an objectivity that identified power and patronage as personages in the portrait. In terms of the Artist in his studio, surrounded by people of the time in a certain place, Mick O’Dea is the perfect Irish artist to honour Courbet’s Atelier. O’Dea is a chronicler. He also plays a part in what he chronicles. In his story, he places a person in a space in a specific time. His work is within a tradition of portraiture indeed but one which involves a release of the personality of the sitter, slowly. Truth is inescapable in the final work.

O’Dea had full rein to choose his subjects, it was his vision that would populate the exhibition. In this, one sees his subjects begin by occupying the full canvas and then the spaces reveal themselves – above the head or to the left or right. His sitters find their place. It became a necessity that when a portrait was complete the Paris setting required bonhomie earthed with jovial company. The painting is a collaboration between sitter and artist, the celebration shared. The Artist makes the choices.

The portraits are elegant, they capture personalities. The treatment of each subject is within an ever expanding vocabulary. What becomes evident is the influence of Paris, its colour and its atmosphere on O’Dea. In ‘M. & Mme. Barratin in their apartment’, the setting is clearly French, the composition is classical, the personality of the portrait is as French as this couple who frequent the courtyard of the Centre Culturel Irlandais daily. It is their garden. The portraits of author and film maker Gerard Stembridge, of Paris-based architect Patrick Mellett, and of performer writer Michael Harding in character as Jonathan Swift – the character he played in the Centre Culturel Irlandais – captures the Irish identity of the sitters, just some of the people in O’Dea’s Salon. The marks of cultural difference are clear.

Mick O’Dea wears a butcher’s apron, the walls of his workshop are smeared with red - he looks out at the viewer defiantly, with his subjects placed behind him. O’Dea has charmed his sitters into revealing their personalities which are then channelled into their portraits, his skill defying time as a constraint, and his brushstrokes giving full voice to the wealth of the Irish talent that passes through Paris, in as full a manner as ever it has been. His work here is done. Now the portraits will speak for themselves over time.

Helen Carey
Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris
November 2006


*’L’Atelier du peintre, allégorie réelle determinant une pase de sept années de ma vie artistique’ 1855 Gustave Courbet Musée d’Orsay

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