1 Introduction and Review
Riassumendo, di Mike Absalom non deve essere il brutto che rappresenta a spaventarci, ma la bellezza con cui lo rappresenta. MT, Milano.
Riassumendo, di Mike Absalom non deve essere il brutto che rappresenta a spaventarci, ma la bellezza con cui lo rappresenta. MT, Milano.
Wine, Women, Song and the Pursuit of God (A Bunratty Fable)
‘Wer nicht liebt Wein,Weib und Gesang,
der Bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang’ (Attributed to Martin Luther).
Mike Absalom’s ancestral family on his mother’s side, the multitudinous Studderts of County Clare, inhabited Bunratty Castle after the O’Briens of Thurmond and having lived there and in the locality for many generations previously and afterwards with alternating degrees of careful stewardship and aristocratic recklessness, passed their blood and of course their genetic predilections on to himself by a circuitous and often scandalously bohemian route.
In ‘Wine, Women, Song and the Pursuit of God (A Bunratty Fable)’ Mike Absalom conjures up a private family chapel in his ancestral seat wherein the stained glass windows (in this case acrylic paintings on canvas) postulate the psychological Stations of the Cross he must encounter and survive in his efforts to clarify his Irish identity. In paint, in the flat manner of an illustrated miracle play or an illuminated manuscript, work suggesting the past, present and future of a particular narrative, he unearths some of the skeletons in his family closet, understands how the Sins of the Fathers continue to exact punishment even beyond the Third and Fourth Generation and moves towards the discovery of a personal and unsettling inherited Golgotha.
Review Mike Absalom at Garter Lane Theatre Gallery, Waterford, November 2009
Wine, women and the dark side.
Mike Absalom’s collection of paintings currently on view at Garter Lane
Theatre Gallery appears initially as a comic series of grotesques, a send-up of the aristocrats from which he is descended. Upon closer inspection it reveals a lot more.Absalom’s ‘Wine, Women, Song and the Pursuit of God (A Bunratty Fable)’ is a clever commentary on an ugly part of Irish history and identity.
While not quite Picasso, Absalom’s work is impressive. His misshapen characters indulge in the initial title of his exhibition, wine, women and song, but as you wander around the room other elements begin to peer out from the canvases. The shadowy figures and telling skeleton in ‘Figures Grouped beside a Harp’ are redolent of famine Ireland, while oaf-like servants, suggestive of slavery, lurk in the background of other works, such as ‘Woman Reading’, the woman large and lazy on her ornate chaise longue. The paintings reveal the hardship and cruelty of those times, with ‘Men with Sacks’ pointing towards the grain that left Ireland for other countries while so many hundreds of thousands starved to death.
There are other elements, more individual, depicting the colourful mix of characters of that era, such as the bloody-faced complexion of the larger than life ‘Butcher’s Wife’. The place of woman is also contemplated – even among the rich
, as shown in ‘The Prodigal Husband’ and Three Women Carrying a Man’, women are shown to suffer.Absalom also pokes fun at the come-all-ye image of traditional Ireland, such as in ‘Three Figures and a Telescope at the Hook’. His works exclaim that what is buried beneath is often much more colourful and complex, if not so nice.
As individual paintings, these works do not quite carry the power they excude when gathered together as a body of work – as a whole they tell a potent tale. ‘Wine, Women, Song and the Pursuit of God (A Bunratty Fable)’ continues until November 11 2009 at Garter Lane Theatre Gallery, Waterford. MFR Waterford News, November 2009.
1. Woman with Figs and Empty Glass
Acrylic on canvas (90 x 90 cm) 2009
2. The Butcher’s Wife
Acrylic on canvas
(80 x 80 cm) 2009
3. Woman Brooding over Bull
Acrylic on canvas (61 x 76 cm) 2008
