o'connor_salmon

Derek O'Connor Paintings Legge Gallery, 19 November - 7 December 2002
Evan Salmon New Work Legge Gallery, 19 November - 7 December 2002

Review by Ernest Foster

Derek O'Connor's painting has grown out of the expressionist tradition, but the heated emotionalism for which expressionism is a byword is not his aim. O'Connor's paintings offer gestural dynamism - thick oil paint, spread and rippled by a sweeping spatula - without the sense of personal involvement that gave traditional expressionism its authority. Every element that alludes to the artist's personality, or draws the viewer in, is offset in his paintings by a contrary element. The paint is worked with exuberance, often joy, but it is a type of paint that dries into a flat, synthetic skin. Colour is brilliant and attractive, but pitched between extremes of coldness and heat that ultimately hold the viewer at a distance. The strangeness of O'Connor's work is that while it is so alluring to the eye, and can seem to have been executed in a frenzy of jubilation, one cannot get close to it.

In this sense, O'Connor's expressionism is in step with contemporary culture. Like a bank or a business it has been subjected to rationalisation: purged of a subjectivity now deemed unsustainable by many, but retaining the shopfront appearance of business as usual. Working within this altered compass of feeling, O'Connor's recent solo exhibition showed him turning his hand to three genres: abstract compositions, landscapes and paintings of anonymous heads, with quite different results in each instance.

The abstract compositions are the least interesting. Without figuration, O'Connor's technique is reduced to effect for effect's sake. The results are pretty, but that is all.

The landscapes offer much more. Without telling of actual places or situations, they serve as a conduit, a template into which O'Connor directs energy. In the large and astoundingly complex Postcard, torrents of mark-making cohere into an image of a stream, traversed by two broadly-dragged bars of blue (tree trunks?) and surrounded on either side by swatches of whipped-up paint that put me in mind of a pine forest by Altdorfer. Nearby, and incongruously, a volcano spews green lava into a calamitous sky of white. An apocalyptic vision, but framed too firmly within the language of art to be unsettling. Every form in O'Connor's landscapes remains pure colour and gesture, and on experiencing this one grasps their point: he uses the genre of landscape for its capacity to register frenzy within a spatial structure that says - 'discipline'.

But it is the paintings of heads that achieve the most profound, if negative, content of all O'Connor's work. Blush is an example. From the top edge of a canvas, on a blue ground that is neither light or dark, hangs a strange form. One is inclined to see it as a human head, for the strokes of red and white by which it is suspended suggest a veiny neck; a purple spot, encircled by a lick of mauve-grey, registers as an eye. The reason for the head's orientation - hanging upside down - goes unexplained, but the painting is redolent of violence. Its discordant palette, oppressive atmosphere and above all the summary manner in which plasticky paint has been used to conjure an image of a living, thinking being, bespeaks a chilling detachment from the represented subject. Where one would expect to see physiognomy there is instead a display of painterly flair; formal play has supplanted psychology.

O'Connor's paintings of heads present the human subject as something diminished. If there was a trace of lived experience in them they might read as a comment, indeed, a cry of protest at the place of the human being in our time. As it stands they are experiments with form and image, and it would be hard to conceive of a more disturbing (although possibly unwitting) indictment of the state of "the human condition" than O'Connor's ambivalence to the heads' human significance. I want to like them for their audacity, but this is the very thing that remains undirected in them, and renders them negative reflections of human life.

Evan Salmon's development has, in many respects, mirrored O'Connor's: his earliest work was marked by a strongly expressive spirit which has, over time, cooled down to a more impersonal aesthetic. Salmon's abiding interest throughout has been in creating an interplay between organic, painterly form and machine imagery. Over the last five or six years he has used assemblage, a medium that allows him to work with arrangement more than outright representation.

The new assemblages, shown at Legge Gallery in November, are busier than any that preceded them. Photographic images of mechanical and natural forms, transferred to wood via colour screenprinting, are layered among fragments of brushmark and thick smears of oil paint. Even bare plywood plays a part, the effect being of enormously varied visual incident.

With so many diverse elements, the assemblages put a heavy load on the viewer; they do not explain themselves immediately. One could be forgiven for thinking that the figurative elements are the key to the content - that a work like Aquarium, featuring a machine part that looks for all the world like a fish's face, is about marine life. I doubt Salmon would reject this association; after all, he has just started giving the assemblages evocative titles after several years of simply numbering them. But evocation of the physical world would not seem to be his ultimate aim.

He is concerned, above all, with creating visual unity. Everything that enters these compositions - printed image or patch of cadmium green - is configured first and foremost as a pictorial form. What separates Salmon from the inward-focussed formalist is the broad, encompassing field of stimuli on which his work draws. The 'nature' an artist might once have worked from (or shunned) has been expanded to account for the place of the machine in human life: the machine and its processes of manufacture are as prominent in the assemblages as the work of the hand. These diverse forms are not pitted against each other as evidence for opposing viewpoints, they issue from the one overarching reality of the world at large. Salmon's response to the world is simply to compose from it in its totality, creating an adjunct reality that attests to his placement in it.

I do wonder, though, whether his strangely fractured sense of composition, which never offers the eye repose, arises from an underlying uneasiness about humanity's relation to its environment. Formal intelligence, applied to recognisable imagery, may reveal much more than is outwardly stated.

Ernest Foster is an unqualified lover of art.