Sources of Light Catalogue Essay by Andrew Lambirth

Felim Egan: Sources of Light by Andrew Lambirth

It is important to spend time with these new pictures by Felim Egan. The densely-worked planes of colour only reveal their richness and subtlety after prolonged scrutiny. To hear the music of these images, you must gaze into their depths, into their distances, away at their skylines.
The work is at once agoraphobic and space-loving: incidents of colour hug the sides of the canvas, as if fearful of trespass on the wide openness beyond, yet the expansive field of subtly-modulated paint contained within these edges is filled with a radiant evocation of space and light. It is, above all, charged with positive energy.
One of the first things to remark upon in Eganšs new paintings is the increased emphasis on texture. Paradoxically this seems not to ground the work unduly, but merely to increase the possibilities of expression. He favours three main sizes of canvas - the large 210 x 210 cms, the medium 160 x 160 cms, and the small 48 x 48 cms. The exquisite watercolours tend to be smaller, but also square. There are other sizes, such as 120 x 120 cms, but they are used with less frequency. There is thus a greater preponderance of the square format in this exhibition than ever before. Yet Egan employs the dynamics of the square subversively, working on a painting from all sides and from the edge, and thus allowing no one side to be dominant, nor the central point to be focal. In essence, he de-stabilizes the very stability he has chosen.
Initially the pictures may seem sparse in terms of imagery, and indeed there do appear to be fewer actual events (posts or blocks of colour), yet these canvases are nevertheless filled with incident. The energies flow in every direction without, somehow, creating a tumult. (Egan calls the work non-directional.) These paintings are elegant, yet they are also tough, uncompromising in their effect, demanding. They are cartographic without being in the least map-like. The colours edge at you, bleeding into and flooding and renewing each other, effecting unexpected conjunctions of rare lyricism. In December Strand, the two black bars at top left come as an almost physical shock. The subtle modulation of the remainder of the painting can help to reconcile the eye to this surprise, yet the square of different colour edging off the foot of the canvas stresses the underlying structure once again, and sends the viewer straight back into the heart of the thing. Back into the mesmeric heart of this blue/green - this cobalt variant - in all the glory of its textures.
Egan works on his canvases from every side, laying them flat on a table top and moving around them. In order to be able to put each aside to dry when necessary, he works on up to ten pictures at once. The ritual of moving around the canvas - the pacing and the considering, the sudden flurry (and risk) of activity - is fundamental to Eganšs approach. In what is a dance but also a duel, there resides a discovery of self and meaning which transcends the actual process, while at the same time being totally reliant upon it. These images are about paint but also about landscape; about the placing of pictorial elements; yet ultimately about the locating of self within the wider context of the world.
Egan begins by drawing in charcoal on primed canvas in order to discover the basic disposition of the paintingšs forms - in effect, where the squares and rectangles are to be. During the paintingšs evolution some movement and change will be inevitable, but the initial disposition does tend to form the basis of the finished work. After the deliberation of the first moves, Egan encourages an element of chance to enter the arena - in the actual application of matiere and colour.
To some extent, the appearance of the painting, its distinctive texture, is aleatory. Egan applies the stiffish resin with large brushes and large gestures - to no preordained plan or pattern. Colour is later flooded on in thin layers. Often the artist has no clear idea whether the dried surface of the painting will retain the effects he has managed to invent while the canvas is still wet. When dry, he will sometimes sand the textured surface back to a translucent smoothness and wax it, if appropriate. This combination of freedom and control is essential to the meaning and authenticity of each picture.
The 'low horizonš which appears in many of these images is eloquent but understated testimony to the fact that Egan has lived for the last dozen years at Sandymount, where the rim of Dublin Bay opens out to the Irish Sea. Here on the strand, he walks his dogs over the pungent sands, ribbed and raked by the departing tide. He is on the edge of the city, staring out. It is a very particular perspective, apt for the philsopher, metaphysician or artist, and one which Egan has fruitfully adopted. Too many of us focus inwards, unable - without a spiritual belief - to take the larger view. In these paintings, Egan proposes a larger view: he offers us windows and skylights on the world, sometimes even a hatch to the cellar.
These paintings inspire a wide range of references and echoes: from the everyday practicality of the aluminium socket flaps which punctuate the floor of Eganšs studio, to a memory of Francis Bacon trying out brush strokes with make-up on the back of his hand. An obvious comparison is with dusty plastered walls, patched and distressed. The canvases look as if overlaid with sand which has then been dragged like plaster. (There is even an oblique - and no doubt unintended - reference to the manipulation of surface in late Olitski.) The matt waxiness of some areas sounds an enormous contrast to the textured beach of others. Knots and lumps of matter form ridges like woodgrain.
Sometimes a painting looks as if powder pigment were dusting its surface, yet each colour layer is in fact firmly bonded with the stuff of the picturešs making. Here are the colours of copper sulphate and iron oxide, sky and earth, and the patinas of metal. Meanwhile the textures are all swirls and swells, as if made by the ocean balancing itself against the shore, or taken from a detail of the churned-up patterns of a back-eddy.
There is a great deal of edge-work in these paintings, but the lopping of shapes and the other forms of acceptable attention-seeking here present, do not detract from the beauty of the areas of extended paintwork in mid-canvas. The dialogue between edge and centre is almost architectural, a ceremonious and ceremonial conversation to which we as viewers are also bidden. The warmth coming through these pictures is not just of colour, but derives from generosity of emotion.
Egan pursues a constant cross-referencing of colours. Black may be applied over light blue, for instance, but instead of dominating, it is somehow absorbed into the light. Literally, it soaks through the acrylic resin ground, into the facture of plaster and sandstone dust which makes up the textured substance of these remarkable paintings. Resonances include: salmon pink or turquoise, sea-grey-green, dawning blue and dusk; a violet lead colour rather than a pencil grey; the sheen of a duckšs wing over the staining darks - the depths coming through to the surface; a bronzy patch like an 18th century beauty spot; pale blue lamps at the bottom of a canvas like footlights to the real drama of nature; something also of the cinder path; areas of shade and shadow like smoke or the precipitate in a chemical reaction.
The texture is assertive, it draws attention to itself, to some extent it becomes the action of the picture. These paintings are built, built up to the light. Or perhaps they have grown - there is certainly a sense of the organic here. (Most of the dark paintings started lighter.) Yet at the same time you recognize that all is artifice: a created, synthetic thing. The picture is supposed to summon up both conflicting meanings. Like many works of art, it draws its strength from the resolution of apparent contradictions; much as the corrugations and virtuoso gestures contrast with areas of very thin paint, literally just staining the canvas, like a watercolour.
Sometimes there is white pigment suspended in the wax applied to specific squares or rectangles on the canvas. These gorgeously opalescent accents forge a new interpretation of the picturešs space. As can a haze of colour diffused over the surface like a shimmer. (Look at the painting entitled Soft Still.) Virtually the last act in an Egan painting is the delicately-ruled crayon line which tends to link up or align previously disparate areas of the painting. It is almost always chalk-white, but at least one of this new group of pictures is distinguished by a black line. (Soft Still, again.) The line can appear earlier on in the paintingšs development, but because of continued activity on the surface, it can tend to be washed out by other colour layers, and so need to be reinstated. This line is never arbitrary or otiose. It is a final, essential, connection, placed with impeccable visual logic.
Egan doesnšt finish a painting so much as discover that it has reached its most perfect point: the moment at which to touch the canvas once more would be to risk ruining it, and when the optical vibration he strives for is at its most intense. His work is activated by the observed world, but filtered through a sensibility naturally attuned to the language of abstraction. He is careful not to offer us certainties, but to concentrate instead on transitional states: a break in the storm clouds, light at the end of the tunnel, or the lambency of dawn. By varying the sources of light - and through a profound gift for interval and rhythm - Felim Egan reminds us that our lives depend upon the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Itšs just a matter of acceptance.
©Andrew Lambirth, September 2000