By Tom Mooney
What is the probity of painting? Revelation must be high on the list. Followed by technique and the relationship with form. After that, take your pick: narrative, content, vision.
Michael Mulcahy, in the latest exhibition of his most recent work at a gallery on the Main Street, is an arresting artist. He makes you think. About his work, About yourself. About the value of putting your faith in the signals your eyes are sending to your brain.
Can you separate the dancer from the dance? Of course you can, and in art with the emotive breakwater of Mulcahy’s, you have to.
Mention the artist and you encounter a sirocco of charm and guile, but the works suggests otherwise. Beneath the penumbra is something that cannot be eclipsed, and that is a hugely original vernacular.
Do colours speak? For sure. Each painting, if it is done honestly and with more vocation than inclination, is cauled from the violence of mystery. Imagination itself is still born at that moment when it is most effective.
We teach in school the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry and song, but we do not invest the same dedication to understanding the prosody of art.
It too has a specific vernacular. It is the antidote of our rush, via social media, to make our world smaller. We fear abstract art at moments of privation, such as the current condition of the country, because it lurks like the shadow of an unquiet mind.
Mulcahy’s work is outside the moated world we are building, brick by brick. Sure, his technique has tension, his colour can seethe with livid bruising, but give it time and the intonation of his sound hand emerges.
Whatever happened to the description of modern painting as a dramatic action with which reality is split apart. It lost out to the triumph of effect over affect.
Mulcahy’s show suggests an alternative view: the content is not meant to match the packaging. Conceit is ruination. Now step closer. Admit to yourself that a sensory experience has validity.
Art, if it is to express the spirit of its time, must brood. And after a quietus, it must engage, which is what this exhibition does. The memory of this work will run through your head as a rupture.
