“I’m trying to make a case for more chairs in galleries,” declared Matthew Higgs at the opening of Salon, the exhibition he curated at Lismore Castle Arts in the south of Ireland (until 25 October). And he was only half joking. As well as 40-plus paintings by as many artists, he has filled the space with an eccentric assortment of chairs, from carved gothic thrones to stackable school chairs and a snazzy designer number in geometric black metal.
These have been gathered from the adjoining Lismore Castle, a turreted pile dating from the 12th century and subject to a major Victorian makeover with ornate interiors by A.W.N. Pugin, of UK Houses of Parliament fame. Now this diverse parade of seating has been arranged to face a similarly disparate gathering of paintings that have been hung to be viewed from a seated vantage point.
It is an immediately engaging ice breaker that invites closer encounters with the work while turning the gallery into an informal social space. It also gently subverts the grandeur of the surroundings. This gregarious spirit extends to the multifarious paintings, which, although not actually stacked salon style, have been orchestrated into congenial clusters based on very loose criteria ranging from family connections to shared palettes and subject matter. Each work also stands out from the grey gallery walls by being placed in its own separate “window” of white painted space. Thus, in a deft piece of curating, each is simultaneously singled out as well as being integrated within the whole, resulting in what Higgs calls “a polyphony of determinedly distinct voices”.
As he is the first to admit in an accompanying statement, while they all make domestic scale paintings within the loose genres of landscape, portraiture and still life, the featured artists ultimately have little in common. He even commented to me that if all the artists were gathered in one room “it would be a very strange group of people”. Instead he often uses superficial similarities to accentuate deeper, more complex and ultimately more interesting divergencies. Case in point is the trio of Denzil Forrester’s intense, scratchy oil-on-board portrait of a baby Haile Selassie flanked by Kaye Donachie’s limpidly romantic female head and Diana Cepleanu’s crisply executed self-portrait bathed in cool light. Shared subject matter, maybe, but also radically different objects, with different histories, made for different reasons and in different circumstances.
‘Maverick artists’
Yet there are also some uniting threads. As the director of White Columns gallery in New York for more than 20 years, Higgs is well known for championing artists outside the market mainstream—and the Lismore line-up is underpinned by this taste for what he describes as “maverick artists: some self taught, some outsider-ish, and also trained artists who embrace some of these sensibilities”. He’s unashamed about the fact that he has a personal connection with nearly all the artists, telling me, “I think of this as a group of people: I know or have met 90% of the artists in the show.”
Some I also know—or at least I know their work—and am happy to revisit. Seated on a baronial throne I lose myself in the thrusting looping branches of a spikey but creamily executed grisaille tree by Gillian Carnegie, then further along is a luscious little oil of exploding whorls of flowers on salvaged wood by Bill Lynch. Other works by familiar names include one of Andrew Cranston’s mysterious little book jacket paintings; Merlyn James’s Bird House constructed from blocks of vivid colour; and a haunting cloudscape and moonlit sky study by Stephen McKenna, the only artist to have two works in the show.
But there are many new discoveries. Next to James’s abstracted house is an arrestingly odd work by nonagenarian Margot Bergman, who has added a surreal face to a thrift store painting of a dockside scene. I’m also drawn to an intriguingly ominous scene of figures on what looks like an apocalyptic seashore by Adam Keay, who Higgs himself also only recently met. Adjacent to a dark shadowy Lisa Brice is the poignant bent-over Woman Stooping painted by the late David Byrd, who spent most of his life working as a psychiatric orderly, only gaining recognition as a painter a few months before his death in 2013. I was also compelled to pull up a (perspex-armed, Art Deco) seat to scrutinise Jennifer Lee’s close-cropped cowboy hat, which gives off a weirdly fleshy physicality, perhaps due to being painted with photorealist precision onto roughly woven jute.
How refreshing it is to experience a show with no overarching curatorial theme or agenda beyond the curator’s unashamed subjectivity and keen eye. And what a treat to strike up multiple conversations with this strange gathering and be reminded yet again of the infinite complexity and power of paint. And yes, there should be more chairs in galleries.
• Salon, Lismore Castle Arts, Co. Waterford, Ireland, until 25 October