FÁILTE | WELCOME

Fáilte and welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Lughnasadh Exhibition. This show, curated by Robin Savage and Chris Gray, features the work of Diarmuid Delargy and Manuela Madeira. We hope you enjoy the work of these fine artists.

Diarmuid Delargy

Manuela Madeira

Savage | Curators' Notes

Max Raphael, philosopher and art theorist of the early twentieth century, once said rather prophetically that all art is about freedom. Freedom from limitations of all sorts, from material limitations (what materials one has with which to work) to economic limitations (what resources one has available to create and survive) to political limitations (what one can say in their work and where one can exhibit such work). In a larger sense, such political limitations shape much of our contemporary “art world,” and much of contemporary art has been actively resisting such limitations and moving to decolonize the “White Cube” that has dominated the art market for at least a century, if not the entire history of Western art since the Renaissance as John Berger first publicized it in WAYS OF SEEING in 1972. Such decolonizing movements underline the idea that all art is political and ideological, even art we assume to be purely figural like Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, as another critic, Norman Bryson, has demonstrated brilliantly, much of art historical “styles” can be understood as a nuanced relationship between Discourse and Figure, or, what a painting says versus how it says it. For Bryson, such a play between signifier and signified occurs even in, and perhaps most prevalently in, styles such as Realism which “pretend” to reproduce the world through various devices (linear perspective, particularly) all the while inscribing meaning into the figures that it reproduces which can often work on the viewer who remains unaware of the political or cultural charge of the work. We think we are looking at reality transcribed, when indeed we are looking at meanings masquerading as nature. Visual art therefore becomes unmasked as signs in semantic space and in ideological space both. Paintings can never be merely innocent reflections of reality, or as aesthetic objects divorced from their meanings.

In another way, however, we might see that visual art in particular is “discursive” beyond merely the notion of semantics. Pushing Bryson’s notion of the discursive, we might add that visual art is also speaking various cultural discourses that speak through the artwork regardless of an artist’s intent or a viewer’s recognition. This is why, perhaps, a painter can insist that her painting is not patriarchal, when indeed it could be argued to still be so despite her intent. And, this is why it does not matter if a viewer misses the discourses of imperialism, the centralized State, or racist, sexist, classist discourses in a painting—they are still there regardless of the viewer’s awareness (think of advertising here and how it works so very often subliminally). If culture speaks through a work of visual art always already, then content and meaning are always already there, and the work is therefore political in its implications. To be a political artist is simply to make art, or, we might say, an artist cannot avoid meaning, and can only seek to harness and control those meanings.

Throughout the past thirty years or so of contemporary art, this idea has been quite dangerous. Even as contemporary art seeks to decolonize, it can often tend to rely too heavily on notions of artistic intent, or on a metaphysics of Form or the Self that can masquerade as an escape from the politics of the image. And, “political art” has been relegated to a niche position in the market, derided as propaganda or one-dimensional or overly strident in its overly Romantic desires for social change. Murals and protest art, Social Realism and postcolonial art often become reduced to a marginal position outside of contemporary art’s more marketable favorites, and ideas like “ambiguity” and “ambivalence” become resurrected from European Modernism to hold sway over the prison house of the image, keeping it safe from these “subjective” or “didactic” alternatives.

We have come to a cultural place and time, however, when such notions are no longer able to contain the political realities of creative work, when they are not able to delimit our freedoms as artists nor as a viewing public, and when the urgencies of our global situations make it ineluctable that we find new ways of seeing and understanding artistic meaning itself. Climate change, authoritarian power, the threat to global democracy all demand a new art, or rather a liberating of art from its shackled perceptions of innocence and unaccountability. Art that is always political must become unashamedly so, and it must demand entry into the new spaces that replace the White Cube as it moves from the streets to the gallery.

Diarmuid Delargey and Manu Madeira are both political artists. They are also aware of this role of cultural discourses that speak through all art, and therefore they foreground such discourses unapologetically. While one speaks a resistance to extinction unabated by extractive industry and apathy, the other demands recognition and reimagining of racial regimes of representation and the “masks” of Whiteness that create violence against all Others: gender as well as racial. One is “about” environmental justice; the other “about” social justice.

They are powerful artists with powerful work, but it is in their decolonizing of the very representation of Power itself that both artists achieve their particular meanings and effect. In both, Mastery itself becomes interrogated in its relation to Power, and in both a “politics of representation” is the main subject matter of the art works. In Diarmuid, such a focus can take the form of representing that which is vanishing from climate crises. In Manu, that focus subtly plays within the notion of Identity and essentialist ideas of race and gender. Both artists courageously confront the realities of our times, and the illusions of our past. Both decolonize the eyes, allowing us a clearer vision and a critical consciousness that empowers us as viewers and as agents in our own re-imaginings.

And both deserve our attention.

It is with such unflinching attention that Carrickahowley Gallery celebrates the work of Diarmuid Delargey and Manuela Madeira. They have worked to free us, and their visions and critique resonate with the power of change, of the people, and of art. For this, we salute them both and welcome a postcolonial future that they signify.

Robin Savage
Carrickahowley Gallery

Diarmuid Delargy

Delargy | Artist Biography

Diarmuid Delargy studied at the Slade School of Art in London. He was elected to Aosdána in 1999 and to the Royal Society of Painter/Printmakers Bankside London, in 2005. He is represented in Ireland by the Taylor Galleries, Dublin and the Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast.

Painter, sculptor and print-maker, Delargy has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. He has received numerous bursaries and spent time working with the Artists' Union Workshop in Berlin. He has received many awards for his work including the Gold Medal at the European Large Format Print Exhibition, Dublin (1991). He completed a suite of 24 prints based on a text by Samuel Beckett (with the author’s written approval), which exhibited widely including MOMA San Francisco, Las Vegas and New York.

@diarmuiddelargyart

Price List

Manuela Madeira

Madeira | Artist Biography

Manuela Madeira is an Irish Mozambican artist based in Belgium. Manuela is a portrait and figurative painter often working in oils, mixed media on gesso panels and canvas. In her work, she explores how the local traditions, habits and customs, are often questioned by new classifications of race, gender and social economic status Her recent work proposes a conversation around usage of traditional facial mask Mussiro in the north region of Mozambique and its relationship between the female body and social status.

Manuela is co-founding member of two art collectives, Bank Studios and Eisil Contemporary based in Co. Waterford, Ireland, in which she has played a leading role of co-chair. She was both working artist and responsible for organising the collective annual programmes, exhibitions, studios allocations and artists residences.

Recent solo exhibitions include Fundacao Fernando Leite Couto (FFLC), Mozambique, Akazi! ATL, USA, and a group exhibition in Belgium. Manuela has exhibited Ireland, Italy and France. She is a member of Nua Collective Ireland, a contributing artist to its visual arts exhibition platform.

Manuela holds a Master’s degree in art & Process from the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork, and Master’s degree in social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in the UK. She has attended the Rhok art academy in Brussels, Belgium, where she temporarily lives and works.

artbymanuela.com

@manu__artist

Price List

Featurette | Jim Fitzpatrick

  This Lughnasadh exhibit is a perfect opportunity to focus upon socio-political themes and their intersection with the visual arts in Ireland and Irish America.  In keeping with that focus, we offer the work of Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick and his iconic portrait poster image of Che Guevara (from a 1960 photo by Alberto Korda called “Guerrillero Heroico”).  Perhaps the most famous and well-recognized image of Che, Fitzpatrick’s piece has an interesting backstory and a critically significant intersection with Irish and American histories.  As the story goes, Che made a trip to Ireland in 1963 where he met Jim Fitzpatrick who was at that time a college student working a summer job at a hotel in Kilkee, Ireland.  Because of an unavoidable flight delay, Che and his Cuban entourage spent some time exploring Che’s connections to Irish ancestry by visiting some local sites and eventually stopped into the hotel bar where Jim worked.  Fascinated by Che’s desire to connect to the political history of Irish resistance to imperialism, Jim apparently spent some time discussing Ireland with Che, who was himself Irish through his mother’s side and was therefore a part of the larger Irish diaspora in the Americas (in Argentina in Che’s case).  Jim later made the graphic image (1968) and insisted that it remain non-commercialized and open for public use.  It is still available in such a public domain at Jim’s website, along with his other work that combines traditional Celtic themes and contemporary Irish culture.

I encountered Jim’s work as a teenager obsessed with the Irish band Thin Lizzy, and with the lead singer, Phil Lynott.  The iconic Thin Lizzy album poster was Jim’s creation, and it graced my bedroom wall for years, along with portraits of Lynott that comprised my Thin Lizzy shrine.  I would later come to appreciate Jim’s other work for musicians and Irish culture, from his artwork for Sinead O’Connor’s album, Faith and Courage (2000) to his work entitled The Book of Conquests which retells and illustrates Celtic Myth cycles.

The wonderful fuller version of Jim’s storied encounter with Che is on the Jim Fitzpatrick Wikipedia page.  I urge our viewers to check it out.  And Jim’s website can be found at: www.jimfitzpatrick.com