Geraldine O'Neill

Slí na Fírinne

The title of this show, Slí na Fírinne – the way of truth, at first sight seems confirmed by Geraldine O’Neill’s mode of representation; her extraordinary virtuosity renders her realist idiom satisfyingly convincing.  How could you not believe in objects rendered with such truth to appearances? The ‘way of truth’ of the title, refers not only to the methods of the artist as she explores the world of appearances and perspectives, but it also refers to the traditional phrase applied when someone has died.  The age-old and universal concerns about the relationship between the vanities of the current life and the rewards of the next have generated a moral conundrum that has occupied theologians and artists for generations. O’Neill, in coming to terms with the loss of her stillborn child Briain, to whom she dedicates this show, appropriates and reinvents traditional ideas in her exploration of aspects of life and death, of decay and preservation, of truth and illusion, through the still life tradition.

…

The forms of such things as jars, plates, baskets, bowls, glasses point backwards to a long evolution in the culture which produces them.  

[Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, p.137.]

As Bryson’s comments suggest, O’Neill’s interest in still life places her in a long line of artists, going back several millennia, who have focused their gaze on the objects of everyday life. She addresses her theme with an art historical awareness of the genre, drawing on earlier traditions concerned with trompe l’oeil realism and with the symbolic potential of the objects.   Her work is filled with references to specific conventions making use of long-established encoding, and reinventing it with a wry humour to address contemporary concerns.

O’Neill has always been interested in objects and when she attended the National College of Art and Design, she found in Carey Clarke a teacher with the technical knowledge and interests to provide a sympathetic mentor:  his representations of white table cloths, with their crisp ironed folds, are translated into her complex studies of crumpled sheets of paper.  However, where Clarke focuses on the abstract forms of the objects and their almost iconic physical qualities, she is interested in them for what they reveal about contemporary life.  In his work they have an almost spiritual presence, in hers they are the trappings of lived humanity; to refer to an earlier comparator, she is a Rubensist to his Poussinism.

In revisiting the conventions of realism, this artist makes full use of her extraordinary technical skill to explore the contradictions inherent in the concept: the presentation of a visually convincing world has the ring of truth, but paradoxically, the greater the appearance of reality, the more effective the ‘deception’ of illusionism.    

O’Neill’s images are crammed with objects, seemingly haphazard, but in effect carefully chosen for what they have to say.  Dead birds, pigs heads, fresh and pickled vegetables, poultry and fish share space with the the incidentals of contemporary domestic life – false teeth, jars of gobstoppers, helium balloons, and plastic toys. None of the objects has a high commercial value, so they share something of the interest in the detritus of everyday life that provided the subjects for some of the earliest still-life artists, most notably Sosos of Pergamon (c.150 BC) whose work is known through Roman copies of his ‘unswept floor’ mosaics.  Earlier examples of still life imagery are known only through references.  Pliny, for example, records the anecdote of the competition between the painters Zeuxis and Parhassius (c.500 BC). Zeuxis’ painting of grapes was so realistic that birds attempted to peck at them, but he conceded defeat when he was fooled into believing that his oponent’s fictive curtain was real and attempted to draw it back to reveal the painting he assumed was concealed beneath. The story was presented as evidence of the greatness of these artists by the standards of the time, based in the technical ability to create an illusionistic image.  To quote Bryson again:

Trompe l’oeil forms a natural alliance with detritus of every kind:  scraps, husk, peelings, the fraying and discolouration of paper, or else objects taken up and looked at only occasionally – documents, letters, quills, combs, watches, goblets, books, coins. In that effacement of human attention, objects reveal their own autonomy:  it is as though it is the objects that make the world, and the unconscious force stored in their outwardly humble forms – not their human users. [Bryson, op.cit., p. ]

By the time of the Renaissance, artists were using still life for symbolic and allegorical purposes. O’Neill’s imagery parodies the work of Flemish, Dutch and Spanish painters, primarily from the 16th to 18th centuries, particularly Joachim Beuckelaer, Diego Velazquez, Juan Sánchez Cotán and Francisco Goya.   In this show, several of the pieces emulate Beuckelaer’s lavish, highly-coloured kitchen and market scenes.  The pig’s head and the vegetables, inPlastic Iguana, are typical of such 16th century imagery, though in O’Neill’s case the pig and cabbage humourously indicate the Irish provenance of the work.  While O’Neill stops short of including the biblical scenes which feature as a background to Beuckelaer’s work, there are religious connotations in the apple and the goblet of ‘wine’, symbols of the forbidden fruit that led to the fall of man, and the consequent necessity for redemption through the sacrifice that is symbolised by the bread and wine of the Christian eurcharest. O’Neill’s images are not however intended to present a religious dogma, but to draw on visual conventions, to make her own observations. The fact that the ‘wine’, for practical as well as symbolic purposes is, in fact, a well-known commercial fruit drink, marketed for its healthy ingredients and providing physical rather than spiritual succour, indicates that whatever one’s assumptions, things are not necessarily what they seem.  O’Neill does however paint from ‘life’ if that is an apt term.  The pig’s eyes were originally closed but, over time, slowly opened. However disconcerting, it indicates that the models for a still life are not always as ‘still’ as a painter might wish - the fly on the chicken in Fly for example was executed in phases each time it alighted, and fruit and vegetables have a tendency to shrivel and transform as the artist attempts to capture their ‘likeness’ at a moment in time.

The French term for still life, nature morte,  is perhaps more appropriate given the references to the memento mori tradition in these images.  However, O’Neill is less interested in reminding the viewer to prepare for the next life by sacrificing indulgence in the present one, than to draw attention to the contemporary culture of consumption and waste and, by extension, its consequences.  She is also interested in the demise of local cultural practices as a result of regulations from the centre. An apt example is Extinct whose plucked turkey was prompted by Goya’s work on that theme in the early 19th century.  The title of O’Neill’s image comments not just on the obvious fact that the turkey is dead, but more particularly on the situation where it is no longer permissable under EU regulations for turkeys to be sold to consumers with their head and neck intact – apparently they must now be ‘dressed’, that is, fully prepared for the oven. Beside the turkey, plastic toys from a farmyard set indicate the bird’s ‘past’, while the tricerotops points not only to its fate, but more particularly to the extinction of traditional practices under common market directives. In parallel to the turkey, a smaller wild bird whose cause of death is unexplained lies to one side, while the gaudily coloured helium balloons ironically carry the exhortation to ‘get well’.   The decaying vegetables in the centre are placed in close proximity to those whose lives have been artificially extended, preserved in class jars.  The implication of husbandry, and the tradition of reusing containers in earlier generations, is an antidote to the wastefulness of contemporary lifestyles.  A goldfish swims around a ‘delft’ chamber pot, a playful reference to human ‘waste’ at the opposite end of the consumer process.

While she specialises in still life, O’Neill occasionally ventures into portraiture. Her son, Fiach, posed in Baltasar on Giraffe, is a parody of the famous equestrian portrait of Prince Baltasar Carlos, the young successor to the Hapsburg dynasty, by the court painter Diego Velasquez in 1634-5. O’Neill shows her child similarly posed, but astride the kind of  mechanical giraffe found in supermarket foyers everywhere – this one was sited at Phibsborough Shopping Centre.  Velasquez’ sitter is shown in an unlikely position for a precious child-heir of tender years, on a leaping horse, though he is presented confidently holding his seat.  O’Neill’s sitter is similarly comfortable in the safety of his mother’s gaze. Both are magisterially placed in a commanding position dominating the landscape, and looking down on the viewer.  The artist taps into the sense of exhilaration and power common to both, the earlier image a propagandist symbol of control, the latter a homage to the childhood imagination engaged by such mechanical toys, both works about self-image and its projection for whatever purpose. Prince Carlos, however, did not fullfil the destiny planned for him; he died in his teens and his father, anxious for the continuity of the line, a political alliance, and the preservation of power, married the young archduchess who had been promised to the son and succeeded in fathering another heir.  O’Neill, unlike Velazquez and his patrons, is less interested in dynastic concerns and symbols of political power, but responds instead to the vulnerability of the child-prince and the unspeakable tragedy of the premature death of a one’s child.

As this and other works demonstrate, O’Neill does not flinch from the garish colours and shiny, wipeable surfaces which populate contemporary life, particularly one that involves the tastes of children.  While these elements provide the everyday environment of a parent, and suggest an apt and pragmatic response to contemporary life, their inclusion is not simply mimetic.  Her jars of highly-coloured preserves have been sought out not only to demonstrate the cultural diversity of food stores and the more varied population they now serve, but more particularly to revel in the intensity of colour and provide a valid alternative to traditional notions of the restrained ‘good taste’ that has little to do with the world inhabited by children. 

Other formal issues addressed by O’Neill include the structure, particularly the juxtaposition of volumetric objects against flat backgrounds; how the contrast makes their material qualities more evident and seem to stand out from the picture plane. Macasamhail, like its earlier counterpart, Bird Trinity (2003) draws on the tradition of representing dead game birds hanging up on a wall, in the manner of Juan Sánchez Cotán who was best known for his sparse, cerebral depictions of vegetables against a stark background.  Apart from the opportunity to display specialised skills, such images traditionally inferred the status and privilege related to land ownership or hunting rights.  The birds shown here, however, are not game birds shot for the table, but birds found dead in the wild, of unknown causes.  The deliberate ambiguity of their location (they were painted lying on a wooden floor, but presented as though hanging on the wall) presents the surreal device of making the impossible look convincing through realist techniques. The title of the work, which means ‘copy’ or ‘duplicate’ indicates that the trompe l’oeil naturalism and range of tactile surfaces is not an end in itself, but the point of departure.  The layering of the image which depicts a drawing of the birds, which are in themselves of course not real, but representation, invites contemplation on the layers of mediation between the object and its reception by the viewer.  It focuses on the act of painting itself and its function to draw attention to objects in a way that photography does not.  It poses the question of what is so significant that it prompts such focused and paintstaking effort when quicker and simpler methods of reproduction are readily available.  

O’Neill makes reference the nature of illusionism in the regular inclusion of the tools of her trade, her brushes and paints, painted in turn with her remarkable skill. She does not, however, confine herself to displaying her facility, but uses it to draw attention to the process of looking and representation: the pig’s head returns our gaze and sticks out its tongue, while to the side, the artist can be discerned reflected back in the silver surface of the goblet.  Parhassius is deliberately evoked in the satiny curtains which form a background to many of the images, and on close inspection one may note that the fabric is frayed at the edges. These still life images are not about painterly ‘truth’ to optical surfaces, nor even about the deception of appearances – the paradox that the greater the skill, the greater the capacity for illusion. They question the nature of reality itself, when what seems tangible and given can so easily become a mirage, or a curtain with nothing behind it.

Yvonne Scott, 2006

Yvonne Scott is Director of Triarc, the Irish Art Research Centre in Trinity College Dublin.