Talk about the passion

Your correspondent went through much of his adult life under the impression that visual art – particulary the conceptual kind – was created for brainier folk than he. Too many unfathomable interactive video installations make a body feel like they need a degree in post-everything theory in order to appreciate fuzzy Super 8 loops of someone eating a nectarine through a gas mask.

But three times over the past month I found myself voluntarily visiting the Irish Museum Of Modern Art in Kilmainham. The old Royal Hospital and gardens are a fine place to spend any spring morning (and the downstairs restaurant does a grand lentil soup), but the main attraction is an exhibition by Manchester artist Hughie O’Donoghue, which serves to remind the visitor that great art, like music, need not be explained, merely felt.
O’Donoghue’s paintings reminded me of the first time I saw Francis Bacon’s work: one could almost feel heat emanating from the paint, as though they were radioactive with intensity of emotion. Many of the paintings are based on the Passion, except they’re more akin to Pasolini’s The Gospel According To St. Matthew than Mel Gibson. The tour de force is a vast decade-in-the-making oil on linen painting entitled ‘Blue Crucifixion’, a work so imposing it makes a cathedral of the gallery. The many studies of the cruciform are dignified, restrained and respectful, echoing the great Passion paintings of the ages, from Tintoretto to Goya to Barnett Newman. They evoke all the trauma of the event without the pornography-of-pain elements that often attend modern artists’ depictions of Golgotha.
Another work entitled ‘The Yellow Man’, with its riot of angry blacks and oranges, suggests a coming through fire – not the ennobling of misery, but a process of transfiguration through suffering. Then there are the strangely peaceful ‘Night Sleeper’ studies that show men and women who could be dreaming, or dead, or merely in repose. ‘Flanders and the Narrow Seas’ is a haunting elegy to the martyrdom of soldiers (the artist’s father Daniel fought in the Second World War), and ‘Antabasis’, a 24-part arrangement of sad, enchanted images made from oil on prepared books, reminded this writer of nothing so much as the Floyd’s The Final Cut.
One leaves the Hughie O’Donoghue exhibition with the residual feeling of having visited a strange and terrible and beautiful place, of having been somehow transformed and purified by these holy pictures.

The Hughie O’Donoghue exhibition is at the IMMA until May 17.