Carlow's Visual joins the fold

'The Fold', an exhibition of paintings by Diana Copperwhite, Gabhann Dunne, Mark McGreevy and Sheila Rennick, uses its large gallery space to great effect, writes GEMMA TIPTON

THE REAL test of architecture is time. Conceived of when money was more easily come by, Visual in Carlow contains one of Ireland's largest galleries and, since it opened in late 2009, its modernist-inspired architecture has housed group shows, performance, installations and, more recently, large-scale works in exhibitions by Michael Warren and Sean Scully.

Currently, a four-part painting show uses the gallery to maximum effect. The Fold: A Painting Showincludes works by Diana Copperwhite, Gabhann Dunne, Mark McGreevy, and Sheila Rennick. It is in essence four solo shows spread across the different spaces of Visual, and excellent shows they are too.

The Fold, a deceptively simple title, is perhaps overly complicated by the introductory essay, which claims, through the words of various philosophers, that experience, meaning, imagination, image and reality are “folded” through the mind of the artists, before emerging in the brushstrokes of painting. Or maybe it is the essay that is deceptively complex, for isn’t that what all artists do anyway?

What draws the four artists together, as distinct as they are, and as distinctive in their styles, is that they are all narrative painters: stories play across their works. These artists are far removed from Sean Scully and his blurred geometries, which last graced these walls and, to my mind, this show is more satisfying. When Scully gets it right you can see what all the fuss is about, but there are misses for every hit. There is also more fun to be had in this exhibition.

SHEILA RENNICK’S brightly coloured, thickly painted works let the viewer in at a point in a story where someone seems to have pressed the pause button. Caught mid-event, animals display human characteristics, and dream and nightmare battle it out for supremacy. Is that bull or horse drowning in a swimming pool, or is it simply reflected? Are the flamenco dancers calling for help or waving in exultation in Holiday Hell? An active imagination could never tire of painting like this.

Diana Copperwhite’s works continue to explore her interest in how memory emerges in unreliable images. She is an excellent handler of paint. Your friends are electric is very strong.

There is also beauty in a series of smaller portraits. In each she has captured in visual form that nagging sense of the almost familiar we experience when trying to find things lost in ours minds. This is illustrated most tellingly in a small watercolour, In the back of your head, which shows a window, mirror, or box, reflecting, past a drawn curtain, a different-hued version of the scene.

Mark McGreevy’s stories are drawn from comic books, children’s stories, things remembered and a fantastical imagination. In a particularly satisfying move, the exhibition includes display cases of each artist’s sketch books and source materials, and in McGreevy’s case in particular the discoveries therein (a postcard showing a massive cockroach; a Per Kirkeby sculpture) enrich engagement with his eclectic paintings.

Finally, the serenely coloured worlds of Gabhann Dunne have a visionary and elegiac quality as an Irish sensibility coalesces both Irish and American mythologies. Geographic features, figures and wolves emerge from hazy ground, and the artist demonstrates the haunting, lyrical qualities that can be drawn from paint. In The Fold, the spaces of painting emerge in a most satisfying exhibition.

The Fold: A Painting Showis at Visual, Carlow, until Sunday