Visual art: Three different ways to pass the Francis Bacon test

A talented trio focus on plants, backwoods scenes and crumbling facades

By Aidan Dunne

Tue May 3 2016

THE RESPECTFUL DISTANCE
Michael Canning
Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin
May 5th-June 16th, oliversearsgallery.com
★★★★

IN A GARDEN I ONCE KNEW
Michael Wann
Cross Gallery, Dublin
Until May 7th, crossgallery.ie
★★★

LEGACY
John Doherty
Taylor Galleries, Dublin
Until May 21st, taylorgalleries.ie
★★★★

Francis Bacon said that you need three things to be an artist. Briefly: technical ability, a subject matter that fascinates you and a knowledge of art history. Michael Canning, Michael Wann and John Doherty meet all three criteria, even as each employs a different, distinctive representational strategy in response to their immediate environments.

Sidestepping the picturesque

Wann makes images of rural Ireland in which he sidesteps the picturesque. His is an Ireland – he is based in Co Sligo – of dereliction and rain-sodden decay. That may sound grim, but, as with the melancholy edge in Canning’s paintings, Wann seems to relish the neglected backwoods and crumbling dwellings, and he has found an audience that shares his feeling for this faded world. He works more in grey than black-and-white, building up densely worked, textural charcoal and wash images. They can veer towards appearing photographic, but he is not interested in photographic effects or methods: he is very hands-on, becoming physically immersed in the surfaces, which have a painterly quality despite the absence of colour.

Woodland holds a particular interest for him. Not just the grand broadleaf expanses around Lissadell, but also isolated specimens and forestry plantations, and common hedgerows and scrubland. He is attentive to the personality and detail of the land, relishing tangled heaps of branches, the unkempt and anomalous, rutted overgrown tracks, the broken patterns of light. It amounts to a distinctive, downbeat, unsentimental take on a subject that could easily be sentimentalised.