Heads, Figures and a Park

Peter Carroll

�One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all those sages can� William Wordsworth, �The Tables Turned�

A painter is always trying to see something that is just beyond the limits of vision, something just out of sight that constantly eludes his or her eyes. This keeps a painter painting. The painter always looks to the next painting to resolve the issues presented by the last one.

Michael Kane made these paintings at the start of a particular lie of enquiry. He was looking for something, a new direction. Figures and places continued to be his theme, but these are paintings that are no longer permeated by Dublin but by the imagination. These are paintings about looking for, rather than looking at something. They anticipate a future direction rather than recapitulating what has gone before.

Walking into a typical London cornershop that becomes a modest art gallery, you are overwhelmed by a single large canvas that swells up from the floor below. It is an immediate juncture. Entitled �Walking in the Park�, a lone figure emerges from a rich and verdant world. On the one hand, the figure welcomes you into a picturesque, exotic world in the manner of Henri Rousseau. On the other hand, you see a threatened soul escaping from the swallowing black shadows of its backround, from �the all-too obtrusiveness� of the park�(1) Is this threshold painting bucolic pleasure or primitive panic?

Descending the stairs into the netherworld of the gallery, You enter three interconnecting rooms. It is a subteranean storehouse of heads, bodies, figures and night-parks; of everything that could come to birth and grow. It is a world of visual and mental echoes: heads stare at heads; faces glare at solitary figures; moving bodies run towards sketches of night-parks. Figures appear and recede into vivid foliage. Perhaps it is the jump in scale from dense miniature sketches of parks to full-blown paintings of heads that make you most aware of your own body. The heads completely engulf the canvas, spilling beyond the frame edge to become a backround; you situate yourself in the landscape of the head.

There is in these paintings and sketches a seeming spontaneity which, on being familiar with the artist�s previous work, belies the long labour of painting and repainting of what might read as impromptus. What is manifest in the strength of the brushstroke is the artist�s engagement of his own body. There is texture and physicality in each stroke. The paint goes on thickly, but not with abandon. The gleam of the oily paint combined with the rich colours lends the paintings life. Viewing the big brushstrokes, one by one, you can empathise with this action and engage in its vigour. You imagine the painter smearing and pushing the subject; hitting and striking the canvas with paint, somehow suppressing the subject from being released. An energy is trapped between the two.

The oil paint becomes a texture, or skin; a fragile container of private space; the volume within and the space without. Between the bright strokes of colour and the dark, deep backrounds you are again drawn into the boundless space of the interior of the heads, figures and parks. You become conscious of the shadows cast and begin to ponder on the darker aspects of the present and real. These shadows have an emotional nature. They are something that happens to the heads, bodies and trees, projecting an unknown face.

Venturing further into the gallery rooms, a dual character lurks in the paintings: alongside a painting of an embracing couple in a park, you happen across a naked figure gesturing on top of a park slide. Alongside another painting of a figure walking in a park, we find painting of a floating, dislocated figure pausing beside a robust tree trunk. Where you find the colourful-�Park trees III�, you can also happen to be �interminably sinking� into the darkness of other night-park sketches. It is a though each painting is compensated, or handed, by another. What lies before you is not just the personal conscious of the painter but a collective unconscious. Mysteries and impulses are unearthed and exposed. There is a direct engagement of the primeval.

It is when night falls on these paintings and sketches, these havens of greenery, that the park begins to rebel. It is then that urban morality suddenly begins to totter under the trees. In the park, there lurks the city�s unconscious. The sublime pleasure of the park easily drives desire towards excess, waywardness, nakedness, exhibitionism�. A sudden production of the pale body. In this microcosm of labyrinthine avenues, of embracing couples, of statues and open greens lit by an electric moon that man rediscovers with panic the monstrous imprint of his body and the mark of his own face. As Nietsche once said, �when we go wandering in these loggias and gardens, it is ourselves that we desire to have translated into stones and plants, and it is in ourselves that we wish to walk�.

Perhaps it is not necessary to ask what these paintings mean. It is not necessary for the painter to believe in his painting. He relies on feeling. In paintings like �Tennis Court Corner�, there may be no clear meaning or intention, yet the painter enjoyed painting it. Painting the picture becomes a voyage of discovery into the inner world of the psyche. On the way, moods, previously puzzling, can be apprehended because their meaning has been felt.

Approaching the stairs to leave the gallery, you return to the large canvas, �Walking in the Park�, once more. In the immediate corner of the painting is a blazing red. Looking up the stairs to the furthest corner of the canvas, you see a moon in the sky. On contemplating the four elements of water, fire, earth and air, you become aware of your own essence and, somehow, grow ripe for a nirvana; a re-founding or reorganisation. You are overwhelmed once again by the scale and the bright colours that make new impressions, new possibilities. We see perhaps a clear, if still incomplete, picture, a frontier to explore newly discovered territories.

References: 1,2, � Narcissus�, from �Realms�, a sequence of poetical texts and etchings by Michael Kane. The Gallery Press, 1974

�Heads, Figures, and a Park� was a recent exhibition of work by Michael Kane at The Art Space Gallery, London. The work was also exhibited earlier in the year at The Rubicon Gallery, Dublin. �Michael Kane, Works 1985-2001� was published by Art Space Gallery in association with The Rubicon Gallery to coincide with the exhibition.
http://www.artspacegallery.co.uk
http://www.rubicongallery.ie

Peter Carroll is an architect, associate at O�Donnell+Tuomey Architects and editor of �Building Material�