Mic Moroney navigates Stephen Brandes’ satirical visual diary featuring in ‘Phoenix Rising’ at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
There is a gnomic wit at work in Wolverhampton-born Stephen Brandes’ art: an ever-unfurling graphic and satirical universe ranging across collage, big drawings, small paintings, oft-hilarious posters advertising improbable phenomena; and misinformation billboards, such as his permanent ‘heritage’ notice before the Hellfire Club in Askeaton. The best of them are comic and cod-philosophical masterpieces, crawling with lugubrious humour. Though immeasurably bleak, they radiate a cheerful and infectious sense of the utter absurdity of human existence. Brandes is perhaps best known for his big, fabulist topographical drawings which, like eccentric maps, are drawn with unbridled graphomania and all the allure of storybook illustrations – despite the tawdry materials of patterned floor vinyl and permanent markers. Inspired by medieval cartography or Arnold Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead, they feature cypress-fringed islands or phantasmagorical, spiky mountain ranges, their sylvan slopes peppered with Brandes’ strange dog’s breakfast of cartoon-symbolist junk: planks, telegraph poles, mattresses, ladders springing up out of holes, enigmatic geometric encrustations, dumped tellies, slagheaps, industrial smokestacks; grids of nowhere suburbia, outflow pipes spewing gunge – an exhausted world of weird mazes and gardens of earthly undelights.
The new Lexicon is a worthy member of Dublin’s distinguished group of public libraires, writes James Howley in his appraisal of the controversial new building.
It is the implication of something beyond a simple landscape that makes Martin Gale’s art so compelling, writes Alison FitzGerald as his exhibition continues at Taylor Galleries, Dublin