Exhibitions 2
Fires: Hughie O'Donoghue (Fabian Carlsson, till 28 October)
The fires prevail
Alistair Hicks
We now live in a time when really Whatever you do nobody is going to be outraged,' says Hughie O'Donoghue. 'Painting does not shock in that sense any longer.' It is true that for all their layers of impasto, their flashes of vibrant colour and sweeping vistas, O'Donoghue's paintings don't attempt to shock, but they do take their viewer by storm.
There is an alarming directness about O'Donoghue's work. He does not wish to disguise the fact that he is just 'one person attempting to make sense of the world', nor that he is interested only in 'art that can communicate, perhaps reach out to people rather than alienate them'. As a child O'Donoghue thought classical sculp- ture and painting were distant and aloof. Then he saw photographs of the Laocoon. To this day there are still glimpses in his work of men wrestling with snakes. More importantly, he sees the ancient master- piece as a touchstone, an example of how art should appear more real than life itself. Though he uses colour sparingly, he is a brilliant colourist. He doesn't choose pig- ments for their own sake. He doesn't want Hughie O'Donoghue's 'Fires', 1989, oil on linen people to respond to 'cadmium yellow', but aims to 'produce a sensation of some- thing real . . . fire or water or flesh'.
The four basic elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, have long dominated O'Donoghue's reductionist vision. Where- as Francis Bacon has looked to Greek tragedy as an example of achieving height- ened emotion, O'Donoghue resorts to an Ancient Greek understanding of the world's structure. Though reducing paint- ing to the basic elements, he does not employ the same vice-like framework as Bacon. The composition relies on the process of painting. He talks in the vein of Frank Auerbach: 'Only through complete immersion in the activity of painting can one become even moderately literate, moderately able to control the possibilities of painting.'
O'Donoghue has developed a highly disciplined technique for his charcoal drawings, but his method of painting de- mands the constant taking of risks. 'Bruise', 1988-9, illustrates this most clear- ly. The depiction of a head is a self- portrait, but in his endeavours to describe the fleshy nature of his face the artist has pushed and pulled it almost beyond recog- nition. This brutality is echoed in the surface of the picture, which itself has been bruised. There is a crater where he has scraped off a whole section of paint. He likes to paint as Much as possible in one session so that he can achieve the required tension and spontaneity on the surface.
No one can be in any doubt that O'Do- noghue's paint has a life of its own. There are plenty of signs of the artist's struggle to coax it into shape: layers of varnish, score lines and bruises. At the top of 'Head Fragment', 1988, the artist has induced the paint to crack. The battered head is left tossed aside like the human debris in Uccello's 'Deluge'.
'Head Fragment' is part of the Bruise series, one of the several themes that interlock to form this exhibition at the Fabian Carlsson Gallery (160 New Bond Street, W1). The Sleeper series, which O'Donoghue began in the year of his residency at the National Gallery in 1984, appears to stutter and be reborn here. Though inspired by the discovery of the Grauballe man excavated from a peat bog, it does not dwell on death. The simplified serpentine form of the human body may echo Cimabue and thereby seem to pursue one of Western art's main preoccupations, the figure of Christ on the cross, but O'Donoghue became aware of the refer- ence only after he had completed the first painting in the series. The figure in 'Sleep- er IX', 1989, no longer has any connection to a crucified form, but has returned to a foetal position, further explored in 'Com- pression', 1989. It is the tension in the human form that has intrigued the artist.
The climactic release of the show comes with the painting that has given the show its title: 'Fires', 1989. The subject could well be the fiery passions that produce the artist's best work. There is an implication of destruction, but a light spirit of joie de vivre pervades. The composition reminds one of a Titian fete champetre. At first sight O'Donoghue has stolen one of the Arca- dian interludes with which he has endowed his earlier paintings and turned it into a painting in its own right, but one is not allowed to linger on pastoral reflections for long. The fires prevail.
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