Robert Ballagh at The Royal Hibernian Academy

Later that weekend I went to see Robert Ballagh’s retrospective in the Royal Hibernian Academy. I went to slay not to praise – and I saw nothing that deterred me from this mission - in fact, Ballagh’s paintings only strengthened my contempt. Ballagh was nearly a household name in Ireland. Even those who didn’t know him knew his work - as he designed the old Irish bank notes, many of the Irish stamps and the set for the famous Riverdance show. Ballagh had emerged in the late 1960s as a self-taught Pop, cum Photorealist cum Trompe l'oeil artist.                                                                      

His work pilfered the grammar and technique of far more talented and intelligent artists from David, René Magritte, Hockney, and his Irish contemporary Michael Farrell. There was a frivolous and at the same time pretentious quality to Ballagh’s oeuvre which I found intensely irritating. Photo-realists like Ballagh had always been a pet hate of mine. The assumption behind their work – that obsessive labour, slavish copying of details, large scale and robotic technique would always produce masterpieces – I found unartistic and reactionary.                                                                                                

Despite being a well educated middle-class boy, Ballagh made much of his working class sympathies. His paintings often featured him reading such tombs as The Communist Manifesto or newspaper articles with headlines reporting the unemployment rates. But don’t imagine that his professed socialist and Republican politics prevented him from making money or brown nosing the establishment – because it didn’t. In fact, like most politically minded individuals – power and prestige was his goal, and rhetoric only a means of attaining it. If you had never seen a great painting in the flesh – let us say by Goya, David, Delacroix, or Hockney (all artists Ballagh had pastished) you might not understand just how dead and lifeless Ballagh’s art really was - but if you had, then the deceitful and crude lifelessness of his work became painfully obvious. The surface of Ballagh’s paintings was as dry and dead as a toenail clipping.                                                                                    
  
There was absolutely no need to actually see his work in the flesh – all one saw close up was airbrushing, stippling and blending of limp lifeless acrylic and oil paint (that looked like acrylic paint.) Ballagh’s vision of reality was as flat as a playing card and so his depictions of people often looked about as real as one of those life size cut out photographs actors advertised their films with – all surface and no depth.                                                                                                             
  
The retrospective was also notable for the complete absence of drawings. Ballagh like most photo-realists could not draw – instead he merely traced, stencilled and projected. What one could say about his drawing as evidenced in the paintings was that there was no inquiry into the nature or texture of reality, merely a colouring in of outlines. This was one major difference between Ballagh and Hockney his far greater English contemporary – for Hockney really could draw with assured and elegant skill.                                                                                                                                 
  
I mused that you did not need to be a Northern Protestant or English victim of the I.R.A. to feel utter revulsion at Ballagh’s portrait of Gerry Adams astride a mountain (yet another plagiaristic rip off, this time of David Casper Friedrich.) The conceit of both artist and politician/terrorist in this painting was literally gob smacking. But look closer – was Gerry Adams just happy to see us or was that a gun in his pocket! In fact I think it’s just one of many clumsy anatomical aspects to Ballagh's art. Ballagh despite his unwarranted success still felt aggrieved. His writings poured scorn on Modern art and the Irish art establishment which had not fallen to their feet in their praise of him. Of course was not alone in that. Every artist no matter how great – will always have their critics – it would be unrealistic and immature to believe otherwise. But what was different about Ballagh was the way he made this anger the subject of many of his paintings.                                                                         

  
In one painting – Still Crazy After All These Year 2004, he was seen from above in his large house wearing a t-shirt with Fuck The Begrudgers emblazoned on it. Other paintings displayed Ballagh digging bog, posing naked, or in political debate! I exclaimed to myself “I mean I am arrogant and conceited but this guy fucking takes the biscuit!” This contempt and self-regard was summed up for me in Highfield (1983/84) a painting of Ballagh at a doorway looking into the country side, by his easel on the floor was a torn up poster of a Picasso cubist portrait. The blinding metaphor being Ballagh’s preference for looking at nature not modern art. But subliminally the message was that Ballagh was a talentless egomaniac who loathed Picasso and modern art.                                                                          

Moreover, his pursuit of reality – it was as fake as a Rolex watch on a market stall. Ballagh like a mocking bird seemed to think that if he could copy something (a photograph, a Lichtenstein, a Pollock or a Picasso) he could prove his superiority. But all he really proved was that he had absolutely no concept of artistic integrity or style as a form of intellectual property unique to its maker (no matter how simple it’s technical means could be duplicated by thieves.) As you may had gathered – if Ballagh were born in Russia in the 1930s he would had been a socialist realist and maybe a successful one. Political people who hold a utilitarian attitude to the world loved art like this – devoid of feeling, propagandist and dead to the real complexity of the world and its interpretation.                       Leaving Ballagh’s dead canvases behind it was a refreshing relief to look at the messy gestural abstract oil paintings of Tim Hawkesworth. However, my relief quickly evaporated when I realized Hawkesworth’s paintings were nothing more than an incompetent miss-mash of Abstract Expressionists like Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly and de Kooning.                                                             

  
Before I left the RHA I decided to check out the down stairs gallery – what a lucky break! There I really did find paintings of great beauty, complexity, intelligence and originality by Colin Martin. The exhibition titled The Night Demesne featured oil paintings of the grounds of a country estate photographed with a flash at the dead of night. The paintings variously depicted flower beds, a boat and a peacock seen silhouetted against a lamp black night which shrouded everything in the distance beyond the limited range of the camera’s flash. From a distance Martin’s paintings looked like very elegant contemporary photographs but coming up closer one realized they were in fact lush oil paintings on board. And what paintings they were! Martin proved conclusively just how dim-witted Ballagh’s photo-derived paintings were in comparison.                                                          


 Unlike Ballagh’s paintings, Martin’s were full of mystery, elegance, and superb mastery of colour, tone, brushstrokes and composition. I would have quite happily owned three or four of these wonderfully emotive paintings and no doubt have spent years looking and looking again at them. While there was absolutely no need to view the Ballagh’s paintings in the flesh – Martin’s paintings just had to be seen in the flesh! Otherwise, the range of painterly effects, subtle brushstrokes, rich colour (including the skilful use of black one of the most difficult colours to use) and sumptuous glossy feel of the oil paint would have been utterly lost.