Breaking into morning

Aidan Dunne - Irish Times  13/03/02

Some jazz tunes stand back from the emotions implied by their titles, just as some jazz arrangements hold back from doing something as obvious as merely stating their source melodies.

Yet the melody and the emotion are usually there. This is not to argue that Patrick Fitzgerald’s paintings, at the Rubicon Gallery, have a particularly musical, jazzy character, but at the same time there is something jazz-like in the detached artistry of his work, which is distinctly wary when it comes to engaging with the emotional and physical complexities of the world. But, while he is slow and considered in his approach to making pictures, he clearly doesn’t shrink from spontaneous, split-second gestures.

Fitzgerald, born in Cork, brought up in London and for the last 10 years or so resident in Bilbao, says he works in “relative isolation”. Fortuitously, of course, Bilbao has been firmly on the artistic map since the opening of the Guggenheim there in 1997. While he is an outsider in Spain, you get a sense that the kind of isolation Fitzgerald means has more to do with the pursuit of a concentrated, almost austere studio practice. And certainly qualities in his paintings suggest that they emerge from a deliberate, meditative process, a particular way of working that is characteristic of a sizeable number of artists, including Sean Shanahan and Richard Gorman, two other painters who happen to be based in Europe.

Fitzgerald’s show is rather beautifully titled The Morning Hours. While his pictures are not representational, in their colouring, textures and other aspects, they do not contradict the mood evoked by this overall title. Modest in size, they are dominated by softly luminescent expanses of yellows, lemons, greys and whites, sometimes edged by deeper tones. Compositionally they consist, usually, of just a few regular surface divisions. A recurrent pattern has an angular form intruding into a central space. In a few instances this is carried further, in that the complementary form becomes a physical adjunct in its own right. There is an architectonic quality to the work, not only because of its planar nature, but because it comes equipped to engage with the surrounding architectural setting, whatever that happens to be.

The paintings are made on wood, mostly MDF, and some of them are deep, box-like constructions, emphasising that we are looking at objects in themselves, something further accentuated on occasion by holes punched or drilled through, and incisions gouged in the surface. These latter marks, whether in the form of straight lines or fallible, wandering strokes, are a kind of drawing, and they look as if they have been made with an electric router. So specific is the signature of the tool that it intrudes a little, almost like a figurative element, into Fitzgerald’s carefully won contemplative space.

That odd touch aside, his paintings are very convincing. They fit comfortably with the kind of painting that has been described as being like everyday life, but everyday life lived at a level of concentrated intensity that occurs only occasionally.