The Memory Man

Irish Arts Review

The Memory ManAuthor(s): Mic MoroneySource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring, 2009), pp. 58-61Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493475 .

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*

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1 HUGHIE

O'DONOGHUE b.1953

Prodigal Son 2004

oil on linen canvas

incorporating

transparent

photographic

component 206 x

305cm (Private

Collection)

2 Fool's House

(2007) oil on

wooden construction

incorporating objects

and transparent

photographic

component

143.5 x 244cm

(Private Collection)

I nevitably, the word that springs to mind to describe Hughie O'Donoghue's work is painterly: the sheer scale and phys

icality of his canvases, the big billowy colourscapes, the obsessional attention to rich, gestural surfaces. It's proba

bly because, despite a thirty-year exhibition career across Europe, he is partly defined here by the momentous Passion series he

exhibited at the Royal Hibemian Academy (RHA) in 1999.

Executed by agreement with the reclusive American collector, Craig Baker, these twenty-five paintings now form the bulk of the

thirty-nine O'Donoghue paintings which Baker has given on 'permanent loan' to the Irish Museum of Modem Art (IMMA)

courtesy of the American-Ireland Fund - even if some are simply

too vast to be shown in IMMA's current spaces.

Only five 'Passion' paintings feature in O'Donoghue's cur

rent IMMA show, but the best of them have a glowering pres

ence: the heroic Michelangelesque glimpses of male flesh, the

indistinct figures hovering remotely, or pinioned in shafts of funereal darkness - even if most forms recede ultimately into total abstraction. Meanwhile, the Hyde Room at Aras an

Uachtaran was famously renovated to house a whole suite of

them, while others now grace Farmleigh, Maynooth College and even, to some bemusement, the Jesuit headquarters in Dublin.

For O'Donoghue, these paintings represent a near two decade-long battle between the emergent figure and his old for

malist, abstract expressionist tendencies. And although O'Donoghue will always remain dedicated to the art of painting

for its own sake, it looks like the figure, and indeed the image,

has finally emerged triumphant in his work - mainly through the adoption of photographic imagery which he digitally sequesters between the layers of pigments and glazes on his canvases.

This shift began with O'Donoghue's father's death in 1995, when he discovered the latter's time capsule of hundreds of

5 8 | IRISH ARTS REVIEW SPRING 2009 9



em 1

EXHIBITION

photographs and letters to Hughie's mother. These chart his Hughie's wife and close co-worker, Clare (her family tree

father's wartime experiences from conscription in 1939, to includes casualties of both world wars). Throughout his ordeals, his two overseas tours: first narrowly evading capture in the O'Donoghue's father emerges as a cheery character: upright of unseemly retreat after Dunkirk; and later, the horror of the spine, chipper of moustache, and musical to boot (poignantly, he Italian campaign in 1944, as Allied troops struggled to take lost his flute in action in the waters of the Po), but he is a pre

the ancient capital, whilst suffering heavy bombardment maturely aged husk when demobbed at twenty-six. Some photos from loftily entrenched German positions. are nauseating: the unrecognisable fragments of a destroyed

Some of this is documented in one display piece at IMMA, German soldier; or the shell-devastated town of Cassino. This

named after Xenophon's Anabasis. Plastered across the pages material marks O'Donoghue's entree into the grand genre of

of overpainted books are O'Donoghue's father's photographs History Painting, with his father cast as a kind of Everyman

taken during the Mediterranean campaign, amidst others through whose experiences we dimly discern the hell of war.

sourced from the Imperial War Museum in London by Both in person and in his often wry essays, O'Donoghue is

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disarmingly open about his photographic sources and even painterly influences such as Anselm Kiefer, who clearly over shadows much of the war work. (O'Donoghue's family story is

also forthcoming: born a Catholic in Manchester in 1953 to Irish

parents, the paternal grandfather that emigrated from Cork in

191 1; the mother a native Irish speaker from north-west Mayo -

an elemental, watery wonderland through which young Hughie ran around barefoot.)

Generally, O'Donoghue is evolving a rich system of personal

iconography and abiding talismans, many relentlessly plumbed from the history of art: from the classical sculptures of the

Laocoon and the trussed-up and flayed satyr Marsyas; to

Gericault's Raft of the Medusa.

Sometimes, his interweaving of tales and art motifs are inexpli

cable. His shamanic Yellow Man paintings, for example, pay trib

ute to van Gogh's lost The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (which

SPRING 2009 IRISH ARTS REVIEW | 59



0 t >:~ t ; $,54 X

also inspired Francis Bacon), destroyed in 1944 during an RAF

bombing raid on a German museum. Yet for O'Donoghue, the

Yellow Man also symbolises a navigator pilot, an idea introduced

in his 2008 London exhibition, 'The Geometry of Paths', inspired by a friend whose father piloted a Pathfinder aircraft over Cologne

in 1944 (Pathfinders were lead planes which marked target cities with flares over which the bomber squadrons unleashed their slaughterous payloads). Along with O'Donoghue's sense of sol diers in a war whose immensity was beyond them, here was a tale

Generally, O'Donoghue is evolving a rich system of personal iconography and abiding talismans, many relentlessly plumbed from the history of art

of ordinary folk braving unbelievable odds to perpertrate some of

the most colossal atrocities in human history - a moral equation

which, somehow, O'Donoghue's highly aesthetic canvases scarcely seem to interrogate.

Perhaps the most stunning of his Yellow Man paintings at

IMMA is Prodigal Son (Fig 1); its abject, Beckett-like figure lour

ing from the ditch of what could be an Irish rural evening scene

(the figure derives from another 'found' photo, this time from

World War I: a captured German soldier with a head wound -

his stick being one end of a makeshift stretcher). Much grimmer

is the chilling Girl from Stellata (Fig 5), O'Donoghue's first ever

female figurative work, apparently; based on a photo of a young

woman washed up on the banks of the Po, having been raped

and murdered by a retreating army. The woebegone wraith of

the girl seems cushioned by a bog, her image almost decompos

ing under O'Donoghue's overpainting; while a bloodied rain seems to gather over a gloaming horizon.

These are particularly affecting pieces; and in their way, great

anti-war artworks. O'Donoghue also seeks to rehabilitate mem ories from under the received history of World War II notably

the much-forgotten Allied retreat after Dunkirk (and the humil

iating capture of two brigades of the 51st Highlanders, many of

whom died needlessly); and the long-censored catastrophic sinking of the Lancastria in 1940 (official files are classified until

2040). Yet this work is more elegaic than analytical. It seems

somehow marooned in a sepia-stained past, rather than tackling

any ongoing mass outrages against humanity.

Under the circumstances, another new strand of recent

works - using carefully staged photographs of his adult 'children'

in costumed compositions around his Kilkenny studio - is rather

startling. Some seem wildly sentimental and sugar-spangled

Night Sleeper II (Fig 5) and, while others have a cooler, fey, mor

bid charm, reminiscent of the early fake photography of

Edwardian spiritualists; or dreamily akin to pre-Raphaelite paintings - a comparison O'Donoghue sternly resists. Yet it is

difficult to ponder A Stone Staircase, for example, and not see a

swoony, low-temperature version of Millais' Ophelia. Or at his

most collage-like, O'Donoghue's Fool's House (Fig 2) is painted

onto a big six-inch deep wooden construction which, in its title,

60 |IRISH ARTS REVIEW SPRING 2009



EXHIBITION

studiously references the famous Jasper Johns painting featuring

the broom. Here, O'Donoghue Jnr. seems to impersonate a

young infantryboy enjoying the sleep of the just, while in the

background squats a rusting barn, apparently 'a bog railway hut'

near Erris, Hughie's mother's ancestral home. Meanwhile, O'Donoghue's expressionistically paint-rendered

male figure has not entirely gone away. His vast triptych, Blue

Crucifixion (Fig 4), may be the very last of the Passion series (this

painting alone took O'Donoghue a decade to finish); its central

magus entombed within a searing expanse of supersaturated ultra

marine blue. For all that - and although O'Donoghue is a pro

fessed agnostic - the cruciform male figure persists with ever more

clarity, not least in the headless, broken-limbed hakenkreuz of

Knockalower, Hill of the Lepers (2001); its marbled, peaty-coloured flesh seemingly mummified in the ancestral townland bog, where the O'Donoghue family hope soon to relocate. If sometimes con

trived, these are sophisticated pieces, expertly composed, which crane towards timeless archetypes. Perhaps best to see these

large paintings in the flesh, while you still can. -

MIC MORONEY is a writer and journalist who has written extensively about science

and the arts.

Hughie O'Donoghue: Recent Paintings and Selected Works from the American

Ireland Fund Donation, IMMA, until 17 May 2009. New Paintings, James Hyman

Gallery, London, 4 June -11 July 2009.

All images ? The Artist.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Philomena Byrne and Monica Cullinane at IMMA;

Jacquie Moore and Adrian Kennedy at OPW; Josephine Kelliher at Rubicon; Kevin

O'Rourke SJ and Brendan Duddy SJ of Milltown Institute

3 (Previous page)

Girl from Stellata

(2004) oil on

wooden construction

incorporating objects

and transparent

photographic

component

206 x 305cm

4 Blue Crucifixon

1993-2003 oil on

linen 330 x 823cm

Baker Gift, Courtesy

IMMA

5 Night Sleeper 11

(2008) oil on linen

canvas incorporating

transparent

photographic

component 206 x

305cm (Private

Collection)

SPRING 2009 IRISH ARTS REVIEW 1 61



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The Memory Man