3. corporate mentality: ciara roche at butler gallery kilkenny (2024)
Ciara Roche’s paintings of late possess what Aleksandra Mir named “corporate mentality”. New subject matter exits the cluttered bedrooms alighted with impasto highlights, to enter glassy and polished spaces, high-rise or hidden in the basement of some corporation or Pentagon office, or simply outside a plush hotel in the vacated innards of a Mercedes-Benz, or a forever-forgetting fish in a fish tank in some waiting area in Manhattan. This corporate mentality is emboldened not just in the scale of Ciara Roche’s new paintings, but also in the Butler Gallery itself. Every time I experience painting here, the hum-drumming of the air conditioning, the sensory entrance point into the work, fills the space ominously or with calm, depending on your sensory mentality. This is an airport lounge, or the refrigeration facility up the road from the slaughterhouse, if painting is the abject process that it has always claimed but rarely performs, unconsciously or not.
Walking through the corridor that adjoins the café with the gallery, you are first met by a cityscape cropped by the gallery entrance door (not a Ciara Roche painted door—ajar car and bedroom doors being the most common exit from the world into the paintings of Ciara Roche). Within the crop I first imagine the expanding painting bigger than in reality, which is big, reality and painting. Yet scale (along with light) are the artist’s most pointed questions, resolved and unresolved here, in her uncanny representations of the world as a flat painted image. Yet another first, I think I see a drip cutting the painting in half, horizontally split by a vertical spit. But it’s a diptych, an abutted composition, painted together as clumps of paint fills the gutter between the planes of glassy blue tables, windows and piano looking out onto a world of insect light that low-level lumens in the carbon vapour evacuated from machines and mouths.
In some ways, this is the painting—or the only painting—you need to show how Ciara Roche is exploring new territory: new scales, new heights, new ways of applying paint, and a new what to paint. Sometimes I wonder why painters have to present an album of paintings (30 here) and not just one. Does painting work under the adage “security in numbers”, or does convention, like the white cube, have something to do with a need to have a particular amount of things to fill or cover a gallery.
Ciara Roche’s new corporate mentality is not so cumbersome, awkward, and cluttered as her postcard-sized paintings. The angles of the dragging brush—vertically, horizontally, diagonally, impasto scumbling in the dark—are more transparent and efficient in the suggestion of sky, tables and a city beyond. Yet there are still accents in this planar and modular application of paint. A piano in the corner is slashed cardinal red on the ribs of its underbelly, a wound in the expanse of grey-blue that, at any moment, might spill out the clutter contained yet withheld within. The space feels like a lounge in which you, as a spectator, are both separated and invited. There’s not much action, the hum of the building makes you feel like you're in the painting, levitated, elevated to greater heights, sensorily and economically.
This high-rise diptych is curious, though; practical or conceptual I don’t want to know. It splits the scene in half and cuts a triangular offcut off of one of the tables: the dream broken. Clumps of paint sit in the vertical valley, the clunkiest part of the painting. It refers back, maybe, to Ciara Roche’s smaller paintings, which are clunky in their application, where the underpainting rarely shows through. Whereas here, in the big works, it shows through more purposefully.
The words “corporate” and “uncanny” are used in the press release printed on the unnecessarily big and colourful banner pasted to the gallery wall. Yet the uncanny here is not the now well-worn trope of the familiar made strange in the corpus of Hopper or Munch: photography has always done that better than painting its dusty and mechanical mirroring of the world. As you turn into the high-rise painting, you realise the uncanny thing is that this very painting could exist in the very lounge depicted in the painting. There’s a meta-representation here. Businessmen, high-flyers, could purchase this painting to sit in the very spaces they usually inhabit. It's transitional—a space where we’re not really present, where we exist in the view and the future that awaits. We are imbibed by the view, drunk on the drunkenness of it. There’s a kind of mimicry, or mimesis, of reality, not trying to make reality real, but to make it inviting. That’s why there are no people in any of Ciara Roche’s paintings—just the residual absence of them.
Fellow Irish painter Ethne Jordan is also suspicious of people in her paintings, as if they would create an obstacle, a crowded room of crows that recognise faces and that’s all they recognise. Painters who paint spaces not people, however leave a trace of habitation, as if the painting ejected people out just before a new gaze enters the room. They were there and now they are gone. Open car doors that invite a robbery; dishevelled chairs that open their legs. Furniture becomes anthropomorphic and erotic.
The new larger paintings are confident, or have become more resolved in the planning, application and decluttering of brushstrokes. Ciara Roche uses highlights systematically like a bank safe relieved of its gold bullion; grey and yellow coins of light are touched with white through the large expanses of calm. The geometry of this new corporate mentality—the tiles, the glass tables, the polished cars, the deep recesses of dark made by the haloed light—create and provoke a distance, whereas the smaller paintings, pinned to the walls with nails, charm you in. This might suggest that Ciara Roche’s small paintings are charming, in the same way we use “darling”, with performed distance not desired intimacy, to correct a bold child. Yet the experience of distance versus intimacy is palpable here in the relational display of big and small, past and present paintings. Cindy Sherman, later in her career, said she braved making big photographs because her male counterparts did big without a second thought, whereas she second-guessed herself as if she was faced with a choice between life and death. The artist added that ego was a small part of going big. However she said “ego” or “egotistical” (I don’t remember which) distantly, as if directed at the male artist in general. That said it is easier to locate ego, or at least its vanishing point, in the self-performed portraits of Cindy Sherman. Of all the combined exhibited experiences, Ciara Roche’s ego (or identity) is less easy to locate. The paintings are both absent of people and absent of the artist, as if they manage to achieve Philip Guston’s philosophical decluttering of everything in the head and studio of the artist, including the artist.
Then there’s the vacated conference room painting, maybe, where perhaps a meeting has just taken place, the office chairs moved. It’s a work of phenomenology trip-switched by causality. We almost populate these spaces in our minds with previous real experiences or filmic ones. We write the script for them; they allow you to do that. The conference room is the most interesting painting here because there’s a kind of awkwardness to it that is more apparent in its scale. I first saw a smaller edition of this painting in the Ashford Gallery Dublin—the uncanny can be located in such a doubling. Here, big, a lot of questions remain around the painting, like the light hanging from the top horizontal edge. It feels like an addition—it doesn’t really reflect the space around it, even though it’s rounded. The oval looks like an eye, sharp at the corners, circumscribed mascara black, eyelashes, fake; inferring the gaze, cycloptic. Then there’s a gangbang of office chairs and the ghostly glass table with seance highlights in the monochrome yellow ochre and raw umber that colours the height and breadth of the painting. And the curtain that sits behind them, a dark space far right, and a halo of light and shadow blossoming over the chairs and into the corner.
The clunky addition of the lamp, smack in the centre, seems wrong, out of place, but then it’s not. It’s centred in the painting, but not centred in the curtain, offset by the shadowy corner and the glass table that lies at a tilt. You’re looking down on the table, but there’s no table to look down on—only the chairs without people. It’s fetishistic, in that we’re looking at the crotches and legs of chairs, with no one else around. The chairs are intimate or suggestive: legs, crotches, the absence of bodies and eyes that look back, except for that far-right corner that could possibly hold eyes.
These paintings, the relationship between the small and the big, is interesting, especially how Ciara Roche has changed her approach and tools in the larger works. The small works are the same as they always were. But there’s some new language at play in the larger works: less cluttered, less worked-out , less friendly, more formidable. There seems to be less work in the larger paintings than in the smaller ones. They probably took the same amount of time but more paint—or maybe the same amount of paint. The positioning and amount of paintings is questionable. My desire for one painting, not 30 is telling. There is pleasure expressed in the paint application of the large works, where you can see the large brushstrokes across the verticals, the horizontals, the gathering of paint at the edges of the stretcher, where the artist has loaded her brush and pulled it down the length of the canvas. The paint glides as if form (abstraction) not content (representation) is the desired outcome.
Then there are those pockets of underpainting that shine brighter, much brighter than in the smaller works, as if it’s been pre-planned in some way, curated repertoire of brush strokes to bring to light the surfaces of phenomena we dwell amongst but mostly pay no mind. Everything in these surface factories feels calm—less cluttered, less clunky—and that's where the corporate side comes in, especially in the large painting curtained by uplit pillars outside a hotel. A large car—covert black—sits waiting or abandoned, the car door open, like the legs of the office chairs.
Returning to the high-rise view, there’s something about this that is extreme but calm. The perspective is extreme, not just in the distant high-rises in relation to the scale of the tables, but in the two-point perspective, the perspective that disappears off to the right. The pane of glass on the left-hand side of the canvas is half the height of the same pane of glass on the right-hand side. Yet calm pervades. The piano in the right corner looks like a toy in relation to the table on the left. It feels as if everything has been curated or curtailed from expanding beyond its reality. We don’t even have to imagine what lies beyond the crop. These are pocket realities, painted realities that breakdown beyond the perimeter of their edges, where drips and scuffs of paint rob them of a possible parallel universe that is not a white wall. The same can be said of the CARWASH Subaru that uncomfortably bumpers the far-right edge of the painting, as if the world is both flat and held by an edge.
The settings in Ciara Roche’s paintings are distinct, and the gestalt created by the full launch of her large paintings in the hum and height of the Butler Gallery is pivotal. Looking around the Butler Gallery, five large paintings sit amidst a flock of 25 small ones, hung low and close, the large paintings are impactful; the small ones intriguing. From this exhibition, a new painter has emerged—one that reflects a world outside the domestic, outside the provincial, outside the small, outside of Ireland, into spaces and islands that are more globalised, more market-driven, more conspiratorial, more corporate, more streamlined, more strange.
The artist’s fields, as Andrea Fraser calls the distinct yet overlapping fields of contemporary art, from state-funded to private-commercial, have overlapped in the painted views Ciara Roche now inhabits with her brush. Is this perspective objective curiosity or a subjective swamp? With Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery (once a bastion of contemporary painting) and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios almost ignoring painting for the political and social fields of contemporary art, all that is left for the painter is the private galleries and Instagram to sell out critically. Butler Gallery (alongside the RHA Dublin) are two of the last remaining state-funded art spaces to continue to address contemporary painting in a visible if not always meaningful way in their programming. That said, they are still viewed as conservative institutions. What does this say about painting, and its critical, not commercial place and future in culture in Ireland?
