Sandro Chia at Hillsboro Fine Art

On Thursday 1^st May 2014, Carol and I went into town to an opening at Hillsboro Fine Art of new oil paintings and watercolours by Sandro Chia. Although I had been waiting with baited breath for this exhibition for many months - I had doubted if I would actually go to the opening - since I had come to hate the posturing and desperate networking of openings. However, two weeks before the exhibition, Sandro Chia (who I had friended on Facebook the year before) messaged me. I was so shocked and surprised by his gesture and I told him he had been a teenage hero of mine and I said I would attend the opening where he said he would like to shake my hand. Since the age of nineteen Sandro Chia had been one of my minor heroes though sadly I had never actually seen any of his work in the flesh. A key member of the Italian Transavanguardia that emerged in the early 1980’s, Chia was one of the seminal figures in the revival of figurative Post-Modern art. However, after a meteoric rise he quickly fell out of critical favour, collector interest - and most devastatingly fashion - as did most of the Neo-Expressionists of the period with the arrival of Neo-Geo and Neo-Conceptualism. Chia continued to exhibit all over the world - however his work was given scant attention by the in-crowd who almost unanimously dismissed 80s art as an embarrassing chapter in the history of taste. That Chia had continued doggedly to pursue his own vision despite almost two decades of neglect and lack of favour by the art world taste makers impressed me and I was very fond of the new works I saw him post on Facebook. So I was excited to go to the opening despite my chronic social phobia and self-loathing depression.                                                                                                      

  

Before going to the Hillsboro, Carol and I decided to have a drink in the rock bar Fibber McGees to take the edge off. I had three Southern Comforts and Red Bull and Carol had two pints of Strawberry Kopparberg. I remarked to Carol that I still felt more comfortable in places like Fibbers than posh stuck up places. After an hour, we headed down to the Chia exhibition in great form. We were fashionably late, though Chia had still not arrived.    Apparently he had only arrived in Dublin from Miami the night before.  I was very fond of Chia’s new oil paintings and watercolours - though Carol was far less impressed by them comparing them to Clip Art and only liked his use of kindergarten colours and rough-cut frames. I liked Chia’s faux-primitive style of painting which made his oil paintings look like clotted poster-paint works by a talented, but lonely and solipsistic child. I noted how in the early 1980’s Chia had produced vast oil paintings but now his work was greatly reduced in size and ambition since his fall from grace in the mid 1980’s - though his themes and characters had not changed in over thirty-four years. Although, I found Chia’s repetitive painting of single male artist figures for over thirty years bizarre - I did enjoy the small differences in treatment he created. His figures did not fly around like they had in the early eighties when he was at the height of his fame - and they looked more worn down by life. Another theme his new work repeated, was the male artist showing his work to teddy bears – an ironic comment by Chia on his audience in the art world – though the number of teddy bears looking at his work had diminished and they seemed less interested than before. I wondered why there were hardly any female figures in his work and if his whole oeuvre was a comment on male loss of purpose and identity in a post-feminized world. I also liked the handmade frames Chia had made from pieces of roughly cut wood painted chalk white. The oil paintings were priced at €26,000 and the watercolours at €3,000 – very expensive in real world terms, but very cheap for an artist who had once been at the top of the art world pantheon. Only one had sold, though if I had been a collector with money I would have bought one, perhaps Cool Artist an artist figure in a snow storm with a snowman with a grin looking on.                                                                                       

Chia finally arrived at exhibition about an hour late and he was soon surrounded by well-wishers chatting with him about his last showing of work in Ireland at the Rosc group show in 1984, querying his Irish connections and talking about the weather. Meanwhile I bought the catalogue which cost €10. Finally, Sandro Chia sat down on the same bench where we were sitting on the opposite side. So I took my chance to say hello and wish him well. “Hi Sandro!” I said at which he jumped up and started chatting with someone else. I thought he had not heard me or maybe someone else had caught his eye first. A few minutes later he sat back down. “Hi Sandro, I am David Murphy, I am friends with you on Facebook!” I said excitedly. “Oh I had to delete one of my Facebook accounts, too many maniacs, stalkers and lonely people.” He replied contemptuously, not even bothering to look at me. I was absolutely gobsmacked. No one had ever been so rude and disrespectful to me for no reason in all my life. For five minutes I sat in silence with Carol - trying to take in what Chia had just said to me. Had I upset him by mentioning Facebook, or after chatting with me online had he looked at my art and decided I was to be avoided? Either way, I decided not to let him get away with it. “But Sandro you are the one who emailed me the other day!” I angry challenged him. “Maybe I was lonely.” He mumbled. “You know, I always wondered why your career had got nowhere. I mean from 1980 to 1983 you were up there and then suddenly your career went over a cliff. I read people thought you were arrogant! And now I know it’s true!” I shouted at him. “I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to leave the premises.” John Daly the owner of the Hillsboro interrupted. “What about your career? You’re frustrated!” He replied calmly. “Well you know what, I am a maniac, but at least I am honest and you are nothing but a spiv.” I shouted. “I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to leave the premises.” John Daly interrupted again. “No problem!” I replied and peacefully left the gallery. It was the first time in twenty years of gallery going and heated debates that I had been asked to leave a gallery.                         

Later we met up with a friend and had a pint in Jurys Inn before heading home. I was left feeling totally disgusted with the art world. Virtually every single hero I had met in the art world had been a disappointment – though for sheer two-faced rudeness Chia topped them all. I still liked Chia’s work - but then my taste for early 1980s art was ‘manic’ and out of step with fashion. Worse still, I could never return to the Hillsboro - the one gallery in Dublin I genuinely loved because of their attempted revival of Neo-Expressionist painters.

Neo-Academics at the Royal Hibernian Academy

On Monday 7^th April 2014, I went into town with Carol at half ten in the morning. I bought two books in the National Gallery bookshop; Love and the Erotic in Art by Stefano Zuffi and Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting which I had owned and loved years before but had sadly lost.                                                 

Then we went to the Royal Hibernian Academy were we saw mini exhibitions by Paul McKinley, Ciarán Lennon, James Hanley and Dorothy Cross. All in their different ways illustrated the rise of the Neo-Academics because they married conventional technical skill with modish philosophical awareness and a desire to wow the masses – yet at the same time they lacked real individuality, anarchic creativity or intellectual dissention and thus their politics was totally in keeping with the new liberal elite consensus. Having had very little sleep the night before, I was in an exhausted critical mood, and all these artists struck me as different forms of pastichers - with stilted academic skill and little original to say. Not that they were unique in this, since 1979, contemporary art had stopped being about original ideas and become all about reshuffling the cultural and media deck albeit with often great skill, desperate ambition and the support of corporate and public funding.  So in an age when virtually all art was academic, establishments like the RHA had regained their lustre. Worn out from a sleepless night, a failed career as an artist and the effects of middle-age, I had a tremendous sense of an art world - despite its gaudy fecundity and grandiose spectacles - similarly running on theoretical empty.                                                                                                           

At first sight, I was charmed by the brightly coloured paintings of Paul McKinley that hung in the lobby of the RHA, but quickly became queasy looking at their slippery surfaces that did not add up to anything. Apparently McKinley wanted to question the cultural tourism to sites of genocide like Rwanda but his paintings offered nothing critical in anything other than his artist statement. Like many post-Warhol artists, Paul McKinley wanted to have his cake and eat it - he wanted to wallow in genocide voyeurism and decadent oil painting while claiming he was critiquing our puerile voyeuristic culture. His work reminded me of Richard Mosse’s pink tinted infrared photographs of soldiers in Africa which some thought a profound statement on African tragedy but I found insufferably tarted-up, post-colonial, atrocity voyeurism. Similarly the colours in Paul McKinley’s paintings were sweet and eager to please as was his trendy imagery of Rwanda. Paul McKinley was like a modern day hallucinogenic Impressionist seeing only picturesque subjects in photographs which he painted safely back in Dublin, exhibited in the RHA and sold to the nouveau riche under the guise of Post-Modern critique. When Leon Golub painted the brutalities of modern war, he left the viewer in no doubt of his political position and visceral disgust – apparently McKinley was too sophisticated and Post-Modern to have such simplistic political or emotional responses. Likewise when Luc Tuymans appropriated public domain photographs he transformed them into truly unsettling and uncanny indictments of man’s inhumanity to man - largely by restraining the hedonistic pleasures of oil paint – rich colour, sexy impasto and illusionistic depth - and reducing oil painting to its driest and most dour mourning after humanity. McKinley on the other hand made paintings of atrocity sights with all the pleasure of an accomplice who then turns around in artist statements and says he was only kidding. Which made McKinley’s work more saleable in the provincial short term but also more meaningless.                                                                                                         
                                    
The strongest works in the RHA that day I found - were also the most deceptively simple. Ciarán Lennon’s two oil paintings on large and thick aluminium shaped panels raked with blunt yellow, red and blue paint applied with a squeegee - had a frantic yet measured power that drew me back to look and look again at them. Still while I admired the aluminium panels and vigour and directness of the paint - I found the blunt yellow, red and blue colours rather crude and unsophisticated. Moreover, Lennon was no more original than any other Irish artist - his process painting style and shaped canvases having been a staple of contemporary art for nearly fifty years - if only because it created the kinds of impersonal and socio-politically neutral tokens of ‘Western freedom’ so beloved of banks and corporate headquarters. In particular Lennon’s early black canvases had been poor additions to the work of Pierre Soulages – but you would be hard pressed to find any mention of Soulages in the philosophical blather of texts that promoted Lennon early on.                                                                                                                                     

Then we went to look at the new paintings by James Hanley. I was curious to see James Hanley’s work in the flesh having only seen a handful of his works in exhibitions. I had seen numerous paintings and drawings by Hanley in Irish publications and on TV and been baffled that such an illustrative and paint-by-numbers academic could be taken so seriously. Hanley’s paintings were even more stilted and robotic in the flesh than any reproduction could hint at. Hanley utterly lacked any feeling for line or paint and was devoid of even a whiff of originality or genuine artistic creativity. His attempts to be taken seriously as an artist - and not just the portrait painting hack of those in power - looked strained and desperate. No more so than in his choice of subjects for these ruler and paint-by-number renderings. His oil on linen pictures, with painted blue mount around them, followed by a canvas mount, glass and old fashioned frame bespoke a control freak to me. His obsession with soviet era statues, macho architecture, bull fighting and images of power was also unconsciously revealing. Perhaps he thought he was Gerhard Richter when he painted a tourist snapshot of the barbed wire fences and train tracks of Auschwitz but I just thought he was a deluded Sunday painter with no sense of real history, pathos, tragedy or the dangers of appropriating imagery you had no right or ability to use. In fact, Richter had considered for some time whether to paint Auschwitz and realized that such a work was unpaintable. In the end, Richter collaged the collected photos of the holocaust alongside pornographic images - contrasting one kind of horror with another. Incredibly John P. O’Sullivan writing in the Sunday Times wrote that James Hanley’s painting of the barbed wire fences in Auschwitz “capture the essence of that bleak and blighted spot”. What fatuous nonsense, Hanley’s painting of Auschwitz was merely an unconscious reflection of the transformation of unspeakable and unpaintable tragedy into touristic kitsch.                                                                                                                       

Finally and already in a dispirited mood we went upstairs to see the Dorothy Cross exhibition. Looking at Dorothy Cross’s work, I was reminded of how impressed I had been of her when I had seen her Powerhouse exhibition in the Douglas Hyde gallery in 1993. At twenty-two, I was shamefully unfamiliar with allot of contemporary women’s sculpture and I thought she was a genius! Then about five years later I discovered the work of Louise Bourgeois and realized with a jolt that Dorothy Cross was not a genius but the woman whose work she (and virtually every other female sculptor) had so tougherly plagiarised was. Out of curiosity, I reread the catalogue to Cross’s Powerhouse exhibition from 1993 and found that Bourgeois was briefly mentioned only once in the footnotes! I looked in another book on Cross and again there was only a brief mention of Bourgeois and then only one of her early paintings was illustrated - though there was a lot of strained references to ancient art – another trick of contemporary obscurantism. So since 1995, I pretty much stopped paying attention to Cross’s work thinking that virtually everything she did had some origin elsewhere in contemporary women’s art.                                                       

                               

To me this overview of Cross’s Neo-Surrealist work related to Connemara, looked hopelessly dated and second-hand - especially the forced surrealism, sexual innuendo and penis envy. Each individual work struck me as a tamer version of the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin. While the passé Surrealist juxtapositioning of objects reminded me of more original and subtle works by the likes of René Magritte and Meret Oppenheim over seventy years before. Of all Cross’s work, perhaps her work related to the sea were her most original, though my favourites were her cow hide sculptures which were not in this show. As for her video pieces in the exhibition - I found I had thankfully developed a totally unconscious reflex ability to ignore video work. In the end I was left wondering what, if anything, Cross’s career added up to that was uniquely her own. Cross’s lack of autobiographical or handmade gestures, plundering of artistic sources, and techniques and use of found objects meant that after over twenty years I was still not sure who Dorothy Cross really was. I was left feeling Cross was just a clever Neo-Academic creator of Irish versions of Post-Modernism. I still thought she was the most ambitious and accomplished female artist in Ireland though that wasn’t saying much – and I could think of a handful of Irish male artists (mostly painters) I preferred. However, like them I found every Irish artist including myself dammed as provincial pastchiers of real geniuses in London, Germany and New York. For over three hundred years in Ireland, original ideas in the visual arts have been something that happens abroad and which we belatedly make Irish versions of - for equally ignorant Irish buyers. Despite the funding of the Art Council which enable our provincial mediocrities appear more substantial than they are and the often virtuoso skills with which we parody these foreign ideas - we are always playing catch up with the real centres of artistic creativity and debate.                                                                                           
        

Later we went to Hodges Figgis were I bought The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History by James Hall, which turned out to be probably the best book on the subject. Then we had mochas and cheesecake in Starbucks before walking up to M. Kennedy & Sons where I bought €120 worth of art materials. I bought oil and watercolour paints, Sennelier pastels, Liquitex matt varnish and a couple of sheets of Arches watercolour paper.                                                     

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at IMMA

On Saturday 30^th April 2011, Carol and I made a trip out to IMMA to see an exhibition of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. It was a hot day oppressive day with little wind, the galleries were crammed with tourists and there was not air conditioning in the galleries.  Carol was almost in tears as she viewed her heroines canvases. I had come with a sceptical mind, but even I had to admit Kahlo’s brilliance and originality. Her canvases and drawings had a rare almost crazy intensity. Rivera in comparison was a shocking let down. His paintings were weak and facile in comparison to his famous partner, but then his best work had been his murals in Mexico, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt.                                                   

  

The fate of Diego River’s socialist art and Freda Khalo’s autobiographical art mirrored the changes in society, where political life had become dubious and the personal had become both political and fetishized. We could no more understand River’s political idealism today than his time could appreciate Khalo’s self-involvement.                                                                                         

After looking around twice at the Kahlo and Rivera exhibition, we went over to the main galleries. In the ground floor galleries, I was surprised and delighted by Romuald Hazoumè’s exhibition of found petrol cans that he had slightly altered to look like African masks, his semi-abstract acrylic paintings mixed with mud and dung, his evocative black and white photographs of Benin men festooned with petrol cans and his sculptures made of found petrol cans.        

It was amazing to see how much one could achieve with humble materials and a bit of imagination. We loved Romuald Hazoumè’s work so much we bought the catalogue.                                                                                                                       

Then we went upstairs to see a huge collection of Old Master prints from the Madden Arnholz collection. The galleries were darkly lit, hot and stuff and I felt tired so it was hard to concentrate on these small black and white etchings, though I did linger over some gems by Rembrandt, Dürer, Goya and Honoré Daumier.                                                                            

                                                                

Finally, we saw Anima Mundi a showcase of Philip Taaffe paintings from the last ten years. For decades I had seen his exhibitions around the world mentioned in art magazines and seen reproductions of his work. I had never thought much of him, but had held off judging his work until I saw it in the flesh. When I did, I was disgusted by such a successful and rich artist without an ounce of passion or talent. He took the art of textiles and made it even more mechanical and soulless. The huge canvases echoed again, male artists’ egotistical desire to overwhelm their viewers and cow them into credulity. Perhaps such huge pattered art would have looked funky in a bank but in a museum, it looked empty and pointless.