Patrick Scott: Image Space Light is a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s 75 year-long career, held across two venues. While VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow is showing later works, dating from the 1960s up to the present, IMMA hosts an exhibition of Scott’s earlier paintings, ranging from the early 1940s, when he exhibited for the first time, to the early 1970s. With Scott’s passing at the age of 93 just a day before the opening of the show, this exhibition has become a worthy tribute to the life and work of one of the greatest Irish artists of the latter half on the twentieth century.
Arranged chronologically over the three floors of the Garden Galleries at IMMA, with works belonging to discernible phases in Scott’s artistic development grouped together in separate rooms, this part of the exhibition allows us to appreciate the astounding variety of the artist’s output. His earliest paintings, produced during a period of involvement with the White Stag Group, while lesser known, are already remarkable for the original handling of paint: white outlines are achieved by leaving the light base of the primed canvas uncovered, with a build-up of oil paint marking the edges of the lines, as if holding the colour from spilling into them. In among the purposely childlike imagery of peacocks and fish, rendered in a deliberately naïve manner which nevertheless betrays a remarkable sureness of touch and sense of proportional harmony, one will find the two natural shapes which were to be of central importance to Scott throughout his career: the straight line of the horizon in the sea, and the perfect circle drawn by the sun in the sky.
Among the works shown are paintings taken from Scott’s display when he represented Ireland at the 1960 Venice Biennale, as well as commercial designs of textiles commissioned by Brown Thomas in 1953 (one of which spells “Brown Thomas” in Ogham script). The spacious basement gallery provides a perfect setting for pieces from the Bog and Device series, where Scott employed the technique of “wet in wet”, which had recently been pioneered by American artists and, if we believe Scott’s testimony, he came up with independently. The three last rooms, finally, are given over to the Gold Paintings which, arguably, Scott is most famous for — abstract compositions in gentle shades of tempera with gold leaf on unprimed canvas, radiating with a meditative oriental aura. This exhibition is a wonderfully concise but representative overview of the artist’s oeuvre. As Scott’s exceptional works demand to be seen live, this is an opportunity not to be missed.
Photo Credit: Kevin Dunne
Continues until 18 May 2014
