Life Drawing 2008

SCAMP’s roving reporter, Mario Sughi, gives us his unique take on the latest life drawing exhibition curated by IGI veteran, Brian Gallagher.

Lucien Freud once explained the reasons for his work to Robert Hughes in these terms: to try to capture with the brushes the reality of the person who lies naked in front of me, by looking right at him or her without hiding myself (like a photographer would do behind a camera), and so to establish a tension between the painter and the portrayed person.

Those words from one of the greatest living realist painters (the greatest one, according to Hughes) evoke the powerful image of the painter as a physician with brushes and pencils in hand in place of a bistoury, in the act of cutting, studying,  thereby capturing the reality as it changes rapidly in front of him. And possibly they also express a great raison d’etre of the work of the painter, though one largely neglected these days.

It is within this precise context and raison d’etre that the Life Drawing Exhibition, whose 2008 edition has just opened now at the United Arts Club (the traditional place for many years now of the Thursday evening life drawing sessions), must be read if we want to appreciate it in its largest meaning.

Here however the artists’ preoccupations are certainly not always the same as those of Lucien Freud or even Francis Bacon (though the two beautiful charcoals that open the exhibition, share probably with Bacon his similar intention to tear off the mask from the model so as to leave him alone in a new deformed but also deeper status of nudity).

Here, generally speaking, the approach is probably, and understandably, less audacious than in the two English masters. One more conforming to the classical tradition of life drawing, and possibly and rightly at times a bit academic. The main preoccupation of the artists (eighteen artists from very different backgrounds), seems to be the study and mastering of the human body’s volumes and forms, though the psychological investigation is certainly present in more than one work.

One of the possible explanations for this preoccupation is that the majority of the works (forty-five works made in different media, including charcoals, mixed media, oils, pastels, pen, pencil, ink pen, graphite, watercolour, goaches and acrylics) hanging in the sober rooms of the United Arts Club are drawings and not paintings. Therefore it is not the struggle of colours and flesh (as in Freud) that prevails here, but the effort to obtain natural harmony along the lines and contours of the figures.

This preoccupation stands true also for the oil-paintings, all very sensual, and a group of vaguely Klimtian, extremely modern and elegant gouaches, which are presented at the exhibition.

Elegance and lightness, great taste and delicacy seem to be features common to many of those works which are mostly composed in a very classical structure, although in some of them we find interesting elements of experimentation and some reinvestigation of early cubist concepts. And in others we see some very provocative resolutions with, at least in one case, no concern at all for the rigorous rules of form and shape.

It is a strangely pleasant sensation to move along the gallery on the night of the opening when it is packed to its capacity. The nudes in the paintings seem indifferent to the curious eyes of the spectators, many of whom are serious buyers, as the models, for once fully dressed, walk freely through the rooms like figures of a painting who have momentarily exited the canvas and entered into a foreign world.

A very beautiful exhibition that certainly must have enhanced awareness of the reality of human bodies in the artists who created those works and certainly now can pass this enhancement to ourselves.

Full list of exhibitors: PJ lynch, Eoin Coveney, Nicola Sedgwick, Brian Gallagher, Stephen Ledwidge, Dimitri Van Wezel, Krzysztof Mierzejewski, Paul Stuart, Comhghall Casey, Helen McNulty, Michael McWilliams, Aoibheann Lambe, Oisin Roche, Ries Hoek, Frank Hague, Siobhán Ní Shíthigh, Patrick Brocklebank, Patricia Brennan

Mario Sughi
www.nerosunero.org

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Art, Drawing, Exhibitions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.