Geraldine O'Neill

“Every painter recapitulates the history of painting in his or her own way,” wrote Gilles Deleuze in his Francis Bacon study. It is a deceptively simple way of wording a complicated insight about being a painter and the labour it takes to make your practice count. 

Geraldine O’Neill works through the history of painting rather like a dancer who goes hill-walking on Everest and discovers a panoramic base peopled by artists, scientists and philosophers. It is about time. About space too. Above all, it is about painting from the skin, meaning that technique matters and that craft must be conceptualised before it appears as art. 

The immediate delight of Geraldine’s particular way offers a sensuous encounter with light, colour, form, scale and figure and with the semblance of a tradition we can’t but recognise. ‘Still life’ is the poetic title used to translate nature morte, literally ‘dead nature’ (or nature frozen, paused, paralysed, mortified). You could say it’s the iconography of a long-ago Flemish Tiger. Born in interesting times, the genre was midwifed by a combination of a paradigm shift in science and rapid economic prosperity (for some), thriving in the Netherlands especially but not exclusively. 

Still life had another object, reaching back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. This ‘object’ generated the curiosity behind a method of reasoning pursued by such poet-philosophers as Lucretius (b. 94 BC), whose De Rerum Natura commended logic and and the rational over religious and magical thinking. His ideas were embraced by Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD), the writer and naturalist who suffocated in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted.  

Forced undercover for a millennium or so by Christianity, the ideas re-emerged during and after the Renaissance, when Gallileo, Kepler, Copernicus and others challenged the way the official world wanted things to be perceived. Key to O’Neill’s practice is the response of René Descartes who woke from a dream with the insight ‘I think, therefore I am,’ creating a dualism that kick-started modern science.   

Within visual culture, still life became a scientific-type method for studying the visible and testing how best to represent ‘objects’, as if they were as real, or more, than reality itself.  Such sleight of hand was hugely favoured by painters, who competed for mastery, and by viewers, because of how it provoked desire. 

Ordinary everyday verisimilitude wasn’t enough – the painter had to go one better and outshine whatever cherry, goblet, pig’s head or cabbage was the original subject of scrutiny. Imagine, for example, a seventeenth-century viewer peering at a Joachim Beuckalaer and commenting thusly: “These apples looks more real than the crops in my orchard!” 

Now, we could cosily follow Baudrillard and speak of the practice as virtually hyper-real but then, the thought of an undrinkable wine that made you thirsty or a flower whose scent was always out of reach became a consumer must-have. Out-shining was the imperative, prestige the reward. The appeal of this out-shining lay in its impossibility (‘I want to drink that blasted wine and I can’t’) and its permanence. No rot, no decay, no tinge of imperfection allowed to appear. It was a strategy to outlive death. 

Death insisted, of course. It always does. Devices of vanitas and memento mori became strategies for incorporating transience and reminding viewers of the fate awaiting all, sooner or later. In Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery London), for example, a skull appears anamorphotically, distorting pictorial reality lest the viewer get too carried away. 

Geraldine O’Neill re-represents aspects of that history, freeing vanitas devices to function allegorically, the better to examine them. Hers is a symbolic investigation of the conflict between real and imaginary, natural and cultural. It is about truth and lies. And about painting. 

Her investigation happens at the level of language, image and icon. When read in silence, the words ‘Luan an tSléibhe’ translate from Irish directly as ‘Monday of the Mountains’ and poetically as ‘Judgement Day,’ but sound them out phonetically and you hear a suggested ‘luath-an-tsléibhe’, with ‘luan’ opening to its other senses as halo, aureole. Or, in its sound-sense as ‘luath,’ to suggestions of haste and urgency. 

This play on mis-translation, on the reminder that we never quite say what we mean or see exactly what the other intends, introduces a series of mostly paintings, but also drawing and DVD. 

O’Neill tests her obvious, impressive facility by incarnating it in different visual media, testing their capacity too. Gestural marks disguised as a child’s handiwork undercut the lure of facility, while linking symbolically to other child-like themes.  

Deep down are questions about tradition, genre and that very particular recapitulation Deleuze noticed. It is as though each medium is a container for a set of wonderings, where O’Neill masters the medium to examine how well or truthfully the form fits. 

Like our imaginary seventeenth-century viewer gazing at Beuckalaer’s painted apples and comparing them to those in her orchard, the question of truth always implies the question of deception. Pliny tackled this conundrum by recounting a classical tale that interests O’Neill, as it interested thinkers from Plato and Hegel to Lacan and Baudrillard.  It’s the story of Zeuxis and Parrhassios, two rival artists who compete as masters of illusion to see who can best lure or deceive the eye.    

Birds were so deceived by Zeuxis’s painting that they tried to peck his painted grapes, yet Parrhassios trumped him by painting a veil whose surface was so undulatingly inviting that Zeuxis himself, according to Jacques Lacan, “…turned towards him [Parhassios] and said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this,” Lacan continues, “he showed that was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye.”   

Even the artist Zeuxis was fooled… and he should have known better. The question, then, is how much truth a painting can embody, and what lies or illusions the painter may invoke to press her questions home, keeping her own ethics in mind.   

O’Neill’s painted songbirds function as both image and icon in this quest, being painted as literally dead, yet still living as painted figures. Birds, of course, are long-time symbols of many aspirations and wants. While butterflies represented the psyche – fleeting, Cartesian in ambition but short-lived in fact - birds flew higher, signalling the soul, singing of beauty, joy, love and life after death.

Picasso’s doves showed peace. A bald-eagle’s image still stirs U.S. citizens. In Ireland, the Morrigan terrified people who heard epics such as the Táin Bó Cuailgne and inspired artists like Tony O’Malley and Louis le Brocquy to tackle the bird as icon, whether Morrigans, ravens or crows. Meanwhile, the ritual of hunting the wren persists after Christmas festivities. 

O’Neill speaks in a matter-of-fact way of being given dead bird torsos, so there’s a pragmatic role for them here as unsolicited found objects, counterpoints to the nature/culture play. Dead nature (the bird torsos) were life studies for paintings exploring the genre called nature morte - and they claim their place. As painted, they look beautiful, inviting reflections on love, sadness, longing, time fleeting. 

Painted birds open a conversation with the painted plastic icons of popular culture, especially in the large-scale Triceratops picturing a Superman dwarfed by a huge, gas-filled balloon. The play between truth and illusion here sees O’Neill creating a disguise where what we see is far from what we get. On the surface, the painting uses iconic images of children’s play, setting up nostalgias for our own childhoods as well, perhaps, as playing with a sentimentality about childish things and how that sentiment fuels the marketing of children as consumers.  

But this superman is tiny. However beloved by late twentieth-century children, the figure is a skilfully understated allegory about the untrammelled human ego, the hero Nietzsche extolled as a higher being characterised by pure will, the will-to-power, and triumphing over the banality of common humanity. 

Look what’s happened. Over a century of will-to-power colonialism, leading to the dark side of globalism, the supermen’s excesses are being overturned by nature, as re-represented by the extinct triceratops image of a helium-filled balloon – bringing global warming, famine and ecological threat. 

A toy soldier hangs impotently from a meat-hook: his gun is fake and, anyway, he too is outsized by the enormous reptile. Even if could burst the balloon, he’d be smothered in laughing gas.  

The question is posed quietly in O’Neill’s paintings about Chernobyl, imaging a country road emptied of people, a bedroom blank of human inhabitants. These references to land and civilisation destroyed by nuclear (will-to-) power converse with fragments of landscape from the more assured, mannered worlds of Velázquez and Gainsborough, whose works she quotes. 

In St. Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit (1642, Museo del Prado) Velázquez had painted a scene from a parable about two ascetic men, who each renounced possessions to live a simple life. Paul ate sparingly, his diet supplemented daily when a raven gifted him bread. Anthony visited Paul for one day and one night but when he did return, outside the painting’s story, he found Paul dead. He wrapped the body carefully and prayed for Paul’s soul. Both men were over 100 years old when they died. 

The parable of these long-lived ethical men living in harmony with nature offers O’Neill a number of counterpoints for the will-to-power excesses elsewhere and the fleeting span of the dead birds’ lives.  

Gainsborough’s The Cottage Girl (1785, National Gallery of Ireland) yields a fragment of cultivated nature midway between the spheres of Paul and Superman. Visually foiling the up-close perspective of the songbird paintings, the quote speaks directly to the marginal, overlooked aspects of life and painting where something else is going on. That something else is what Superman doesn’t notice in his relentless pursuit of action and acquisition. It is the slippage between words and people, illusion and truth, gaze and eye, English or Irish translations of Luan an tSléibhe.   

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Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon the Logic of Sensation. Trans. D.W. Smith. Paris: Editions de la Difference, 1981. This ed. London/New York: Continuum 2004, p. 122 ff. 

René Descartes Discourse on Method and The Meditations. This trans. F.E. Sutcliffe 1968, this ed. London: Penguin 1974.

Niall Ó Dónaill Foclóir Gaeilge Béarla. Ed T. de Bháldraithe. BAC: Oifig an tSoláthair, 1977.

Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis ed. J-A Miller, trans. A. Sheridan. (Seminar XI). Paris: Seuil, 1973, English language ed.1978, this ed. New York/London: Norton, 1998, pp. 103, 111 ff.    

For O’Neill specifically, see Pliny, Natural History, asreferenced in Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, London: Reaktion, 1990, p. 30. In particular, see Dr. Yvonne Scott, Jane Humphries, Brian Maguire referenced in her bibliography. 

George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) is an early retort to Nietzsche’s übermensch, (literally ‘overman’) introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891).   

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