The most exciting aspects of Gary Coyle’s practice are arguably his performative, photographic and sculptural work, as these forms often best highlight his skill for being present in the work (as the witty sarcastic storyteller in the lecture-performances from his 2010 exhibition At Sea in the Royal Hibernian Academy) while also representing a sense of physical absence (in his found object installations and his barren seascape photography). Coyle’s latest exhibition Into The Woods, which is installed in the Ashford Gallery of the RHA, offers a new series of large charcoal drawings on paper which forego the concrete physicality of At Sea for something altogether more speculative.
The RHA’s Ashford Gallery is a slight space; Coyle embraces this with a large wallpaper installation that encompasses its four walls with a distorted rendering of claustrophobic hyperborean woodland drawn in a jagged etched style, landing somewhere between illustration and repeat pattern. The first of the hung drawings, Curtain, introduces the running motif in the show of drawn ornamental frames at the page’s borders. The murky quality of the charcoal on the page lends the feel of early photography to this depiction of a curtain. The tense and uneasy atmosphere of the drawing recalls David Lynch’s style of projecting the banal through a magic realist lens.
Coyle’s style of charcoal drawing changes throughout the show. The blurred foggy smudges in Curtain are replaced by strong defined gestural lines in Ingenue, a semi-abstract drawing of what appears to be a cat’s head. One of the stronger images in the show, Gregory, combines these two different forms of charcoal mark-making to produce a haunting portrait of an androgynous young boy in front of an idyllic nature scene. His hairstyle and outfit are from a different era; like an image from a missing person’s notice his lost, muddy eyes stare out at the viewer forebodingly. While the foreground image of the boy appears in the blurred photographic style of Curtain, the composition of the work, with its oval border and the uncertain perspective of the image’s background scene, suggests pre-Renaissance religious painting. The combination of 1970s fashion with 1370s composition would seem playful if not for the grimness the image implies.
A hand clutching a smart phone protrudes into the frame of Dreaming Different Dreams, hung in the centre of the far wall. The smart phone’s camera function is shown pointing at some unclear forest atrocity that consumes the majority of the composition. Smoke bellows out of the gorgeous charcoal haze of Coyle’s ambiguously drawn foliage. The drawing’s title suggests something otherworldly, but the act of recording disasters is very much ingrained into our contemporary society. Dreaming Different Dreams attempts to posit itself in the uncomfortable position between the vapid normality of daily smart phone usage and the fiercely confounding reality of disaster.
Another shrouded catastrophe appears in 27/7/1979 The Death of Disco. Bringing Coyle’s attentive drawing style to the fore, the filmic quality of the smoke plumes emerging from the scene’s flat expanse recall the grainy hum of Coyle’s photographic series Lovely Water.
Into The Woods is a competently conceived exhibition containing some wonderfully realised charcoal drawings. Although it manages to overcome the restrictions of its installation space, it is lacking in the ambition which has made Coyle’s previous projects so memorable. His decision to question contemporary image culture through drawing rather than a lens-based means is understandable, and, although Coyle has a truly rare and acute ability with charcoal, his biggest strengths simply are not on full display in the show.
Running until October 10th in the Kerlin Gallery, David Godbold’s More like living than life itself presents a wealth of new paintings, drawings, and neon sculptures from the Irish-based artist. Although the neon sign has become the tired go-to staple of contemporary art’s repertoire, Godbold manages to combine signage with paintings in a restrained way that doesn’t feel like a cliché. One such painting with an accompanied neon sign is Untitled (New Horizon). The wound overlapping tubes of neon emit a dim clinical blue light above the (less remarkable) painting; glowing in cursive, the sign reads ‘more like this than that’. Power cables droop down from above the gallery wall; the wires are slung like arms embracing the scrawled words, hurrying them up into their grasp. Godbold’s neon signs are remarkable due to the personality that’s inscribed into them through their structural and aesthetic means, rather than what is being written: the glowing lines which make up the words overlap in three dimensions as if the neon was drawn straight into the space by the artist’s hand, rather than by a lighting technician.
Untitled (Artist Thinking) combines Godbold’s clean ink drawn lines with loose colouring pencil words and gestures. ‘More Clouds’ and ‘Less Clouds’ are written in place of actual drawn clouds; An arrow under the words ‘Artist Thinking’ points at a pensive character in the image’s background like it was sneakily graffitied into a library’s schoolbook. The illustrative qualities of Artist Thinking, and a little less and More like living are reminiscent of a colouring book, making Godbold’s processes feel like some kind of schoolboy experiment: these ink drawings are filled-in or coloured-over before being drawn onto and annotated. The series of drawings 13 Crucifixions takes this concept further, with each drawing seemingly superimposed on top of a child’s religion copybook exercise.
Godbold’s paintings are concerned with processes of layering, reiterating, correcting and fixing. The circled mistakes, corrections, and scrawled notes littering the paintings instil the work with a sense of playful naivety. Godbold’s use of oil paint, colouring pencils, crayons, and watercolour is thoughtful, vivacious, and full of character in a style that is unmistakably his own.
Into the Woods is exhibited at the Ashford Gallery in the Royal Hibernian Academy until Sunday 18th October. More like living than life itself is exhibited at the Kerlin Gallery until Saturday 10th October.
Words: Aidan Wall
