Seductive Disquiet

Joan O’Doherty’s show of recent paintings and installations, which graced the Definitely Superior gallery in January, sought to convey the experience of the dispossessed, the immigrant, the exile. The artist thus confronted a peculiar and delicate representational problem. She elected to depict an absence, a negative. It is a subject whose key element is always just offstage and whose centre is empty. The subject is a self compelled to be in motion, severed from its native centre, yet burdened by history and tethered by memories to a mysterious core of culture.
The work in this show deploys the centrifugal forces contained in the theme of exile. For the most part the paintings are abstract arenas of colour, framed in swirling metallic impasto, bronzes and copper and gold laid over rich green and blues, with shapes resembling gates or doors which open into glowing empty interiors. The dynamic pulse of these painted spaces attest to their passionate life and their emotional weight, yet at the centre they flicker and glide elusively, they resist our gaze, they push back, we are not admitted. In some paintings we see attached the copper bullet shells that speak of a darker history and explain succinctly the reasons for the exile. At the same time the use of metallic effects creates a odd celebratory and militant air in some paintings , as in a warrior’s shield or coat of arms, and seem to be a declaration of pride in having survived in spite of everything.
The most powerful of the paintings such as An Cuardach (The Quest) have an iconic power verging on the religious, and of course this is totally appropriate since the work speaks to the power of such forces as religion and culture to disperse the individual , largely against one’s will, across the globe. But more significantly, the central shape in such paintings, seen first as a negative space receding beyond the opening doors,gradually becomes an ambiguously positive shape assuming the shape of a goblet or grail. Once apprehended this shape resumes its original negative posture.This momentary inversion of positive and negative, of emptiness turning into fullness and back again, is a most brilliant, dynamic, and visceral presentation of the sense of dispossession.
The exhibition as a whole is a search for centres and centredness, so it should not be surprising that the very centre of the gallery is occupied by a massive symmetrical construction, resembling a small temple, whose walls are made up of four canvases. The viewer is invited to enter this construction by passing through the split centres of the north or south paintings. The interior, shrouded in black fabric, is dark and empty and admits light mainly from a circular gap in the tent-like ceiling. Similar to the positive / negative inversion which drives the paintings, there takes hold here contradictory physical impulses to stay and flee. The dark space lit from above creates a calming quiet space yet the sheer emptiness deprives the experience of the possibility of comfort or restfulness. The mind quickly grows anxious having found the centre to be a void, and one is impelled out the other side. One is more at ease outside, viewing the painted walls and the symbolic details ranked around the stepped base. O’Doherty’s show offers images of great beauty, occasionally even of majesty, and of a noble and passionate grief. Her true achievement has been to create a seductive disquiet which can enchant us even as it speaks of tragic events and which takes us to places of emptiness that are mysteriously compelling.

~ Mark Nisenholt

11/2/97