On entering the impressive main gallery at Butler Gallery through an incongruously small doorway, the deep hum of an air conditioner can be heard, creating a somehow sympathetic soundscape for Ciarán Murphy’s enigmatic paintings, which poke atmospheric holes in the precious white walls of the gallery. This hum is soon forgotten, surrounded by the 20-odd bareback paintings and framed collages, the latter being the generative paper tableaux for Murphy’s paintings.

Dotted among this selection of paintings—curated by Patrick T Murphy—are three images of driving, one collage and two paintings. One of these ‘driving paintings’ is entitled Are we there yet, a minimalist blur of twilight-blue car windows and headlights evoking the sound of synthesisers circa 1986. Are we there yet is the popularised and playfully repetitive childhood mantra of unmaintainable boredom and unreachable desire mediated through The Simpsons and Schopenhauer’s existential pendulum that swings painfully from boredom to desire in his philosophy of the human condition. Are we there yet, designated as a painting title, is also a confession, one that opens up the work and exhibition towards passengers outside the field of painting, the walls of the gallery and beyond Murphy’s sometimes violent crop.

Even though there are no representations of children here, the presence of children is engendered in paintings like the hand-cupped budgies, the prostrate zebra, or the Fauvist dolphin. There is also this feeling of being watched, down low, from a child’s perspective (are those a child’s eyes lazer-glaring through that cropped letterbox-size opening of space?)

Children are also intimated in the exhibition title Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily. Like Murphy’s paintings, the title says a lot without saying it all. The artist’s voice in words and paint stops at the moment (or precipice—if you view them as existential paintings as I do) of revelation. The nursery rhyme Row, Row, Row Your Boat from which Murphy had spliced this exhibition title Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily, ends the four of its verses with the line Life is but a dream. This of course, as a children’s sing-along, is meant positively and protectively, as in Life is but a dream that can be dreamt-up to your heart’s and imagination’s content. It’s unrealistic: to confuse or conflate the dreamworld with the lifeworld ends up being a soft leap with a hard landing.

Those who are familiar with Murphy’s paintings will know him as a painter who has made paintings consistent in mood with a slow and nuanced evolution in paint application. He is an artist who, even though known on the scene for 15-odd years since his work’s inception in the then new gallery Mother’s Tankstation Dublin, has not oversaturated the scene via that perennial and predictable phenomenon of curtatorial consensus. He is a painter we miss, not tolerate. Murphy became the painter he is today 15 years ago.

This steadfastness and commitment to his vision (Murphy is a visionary painter) is remarkable in a time when restlessness and anxiety to change is pervasive in an image and self-obsessed world. Perhaps not having an Irish gallery and being represented by Grimm Gallery Amsterdam, with a studio in rural Kilkenny, has helped him avoid this culture of restlessness and anxiety that the contemporary artist is forced to navigate in the competitive city or distil through Instagram illusions. Or he has somehow sublimated and partly disguised his restlessness and anxieties in his paintings. Look and see.

From afar Murphy’s paintings have a visual and atmospheric consistency as if they breathe the same air, but not ours. And yet the artist shifts gears from one painting to the next in how abstract shapes inform or veil the reality he is presenting in all its moodiness. Up close his painterly approach is responsive to his varied subject matter, a subject matter that most of the time lounges, what one might call an ‘aesthetic of lounging’ is at play, from the scalded orange feet lounging on a sun bed, or the serial bodies levitating in miasmic or gradient atmospheres of paint. Bleached white hands, fetishistic in their fragmentation and disarticulation from the whole body, seem all bone and no blood, as they sink into the weave of the canvas and tooth of the primer. The backdrops in contrast are swathed in horizontal or vertical strokes of opaque, dark and heavy paint embossed with a history of other decisions, buried but still haunting the surface. Strangest of all the painted textures is found smeared on Murphy’s painting of a numbered racing track, as if the painting fell onto a palette of dark paint and was then decoupled to leave an orange peel skin texture.

I wrote in a recent review of Ciara Roche’s paintings at Mother’s Tankstation Dublin (link here), that there is “a turn in her paintings” that helps to offset the flatness, and in turn, physically turn you into her paintings. Murphy’s paintings have more of a tilt (like Ed Ruscha’s text paintings) due to their emphasis on flatness, stemming from the source collages, like his painting of the tilted letterbox-framed eyes, or the hands that hold a painting of a head evacuating vapour, smoke or some interior essence from its mouth. Murphy’s paintings tilt against a world of soft and sharp. Some elements are sfumato soft, others are paper-cut sharp. You can’t deny references to Belgian painters Luc Tuymans and Michaël Borremans. That said, Murphy’s paintings are not concerned with the traumatic stain of history or a surrealist theatre of the absurd, but something more timely, present, one insisting on a separation between painted representation and its reality referent.

The line Life is but a dream—set adrift on the horizon of this exhibition—is the very thing that Murphy’s paintings struggle with, what he describes in the press release as the possible disentanglement of two interconnected binaries, whether that is reality and painted representation, or the lifeworld and the dream world correlative. What I would say is painting needs reality as a referent, but there is a moment in which mimesis is left behind and painting becomes a property in and of itself in the synthesis of subject with the substance of paint.

If Life is but a dream, then Murphy’s paintings do that thing that dreams do, what Freud described as “condensation” in his dream-work. The way I describe condensation to my psychoanalysis and art students is to visualise a window in the half light of twilight, with the temperature dropping, condensation, vapours and self-reflection collaborating to mesmerise from within, while rain, shadows, lights and the movement of civilisation and nature amalgamate from without. Condensation is a metaphorical and recognisable space that unifies everything through the transparency and synthesis of a constellation of recognisable dreamt-up images. In the same way Ciaran Murphy’s paintings distil the dizziness of the world of images and the vertigo of freedom to choose in their singularity and entirety. —James Merrigan

Through 9 January 2022.