Hugh McCarthy at studio1.1

Hugh McCarthy, Gasoline Rainbow
Studio1.1
6 – 28 Feb 09

I see clouds and cloud shapes, maybe some scaffolding or tower structures. I make another round of the paintings. This one–“G-Man”– has shapes like blue bar tables with things hanging from the ceiling. It could be a stylized rendering of one of the lounges right around the corner. It is not; it is the only one that lends itself to a non-abstract interpretation and so I guess cannot really be interpreted that way. I pick a painting to examine closer.

G-Man, 2008

“The Lesson” is one of the most complex in the room. There is an empty space in the middle and so it feels even more subject-less than the others, yet still not quite decorative. Despite the almost collage-like way in which such varied elements are thrown together, there is a carefulness behind them. Brown painted drips are echoed and subverted by real drips of paint dangling like three cartoon spider legs toward the center of the composition. These drips of paint are more prominent and isolated, more on display than the dripping in, say, “Utopian Blaster” or “The Great Nintendo Famine”, and so seem more intentional, more a genuine part of the painting rather than an effect meant to enhance the parts of the painting.

The Lesson, 2007

Even without the titles, it is hard to not think of video games while looking at these paintings. It is not simply the color or design that evokes this, but the mix of bubbly playfulness with a sinister undercurrent. Both the sinister and energetic seem familiar, though, and as such the paintings are far more accessible than they initially seem and have far more to say than something that looks so pop-art, or even decorative, normally does.

The most sinister thing in this exhibition, in fact, is this walking of the line between honest, intentioned art and decorative wall-hangings. Descriptions of Hugh McCarthy’s work invariably move toward some mention of tension–between order and restlessness, abstraction and landscape, utopia and dystopia. The strongest tension, though, is in the eye of viewer that must decide whether the uniformity of colors and the echoing of shapes between the canvases, whether the sometimes almost cliché abstract designs push these paintings too far into the decorative camp or not. It is palpable.

They do not, but it takes a while to discover this.

Studio1.1 is divided into two levels. The amount of material on the lower, smaller level leads me to wonder why so much space has been left open above (there’s a whole wall free). You ring the doorbell to enter and a man lets you in, quietly, a little suspicious. There are postcards for sale and a kitchen past the corridor on the lower level. I heard a lightbulb explode down there.

Downstairs and to the right are a couple paintings that seem to go together–even more so than the others. The whole exhibition is dangerously unified in tone, form, and design; there is an even greater consistency between the canvases in this room, but it works. Both paintings are dominated by a mechanical-geometric presence that almost blocks out the other elements of the paintings. “Black Lemonade” is dominated by dark, opaque holed gear shapes. “Computer, How are ye…?” by beams spanning an unfinished tower, waiting for a Bruce Willis or James Bond to leap across the scene. Adding to the game-like quality, though detracting from the seriousness, playful drifting shapes fall tetris-like through the structure. The two-dimensionality of the shapes, however, contrasts in such a way with the 3D gray structure that they seem almost laid over the top of the rest of the scene, like a floater in your eye; something in the scene yet not at all a part of it.

Computers How Are Ye...?, 2008

This layering of different types of shapes is common to most all of his painting here–take the designs coming out of the corners and seemingly overtaking the dot-tables in “G-Man”, for instance–and I think we have to see this as part of what can only be called McCarthy’s vision of reality. When it moves too far from a direct expression of that vision, the exhibition errs on the side of playful; never disturbing. The paintings are, at times, threatening–“Utopian Blaster”‘s steel frame directly threatens a colorful clump of balloon shapes–but never too serious, and I think that’s commendable. Art, they seem to say, like reality, like video games, is a game and can only be approached as such.     – M.O. Berger
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Further reading:
http://www.monstertruck.ie/hugh.html
Bio: http://www.stonegallery.ie/artists-images/FULLSIZE/artist-pdf-cvs/hugh-mccarthy.pdf
http://www.recirca.com/reviews/2007/texts/pink.shtml