The MAC Belfast is the house that M.C. Escher drew and Gregor Schneider built. Grey concrete cascades and spills from a forever height to form a delta of anti-social rooms — Upper/ Tall/ Common/ Sunken — that somehow manage to not look into one another. Narcissists. A stairs appears amidst a cul de sac of seating areas, and climbs this disarticulated edifice to bring you to the top, kind of, where the exhibition begins or ends in the Tall Gallery, the penthouse of the exhibition spaces in terms of grandeur if not top-down position and scale. *Remember: the setting is important.

NEW EXITS, The MAC BELFAST, 2023, photo: Simon Mills

The painting exhibition that fills these rooms currently (through March 26th — my birthday) is heralded as “end of the 10th Year Anniversary Celebrations” of The MAC. To curate a painting exhibition under the auspices of celebrating an institution becoming an institution in the city of Belfast, is perfectly in keeping with painting’s position as the user-friendliest kind of contemporary art. Painting is not going to offend the passer-by, or what art people call lay people. The only offence painting causes these days is among painters competing over the same premium white walls of the far and few commercial gallery spaces in the South and especially North of Ireland.

Beside the context of The MAC’s 10th anniversary, and the interesting fact that the work is by graduates of the BA and MFA Fine Art courses at Belfast School of Art since 2012, the press release further contextualises the exhibition with an essay written at the turn of the1970s, when No-Wave New York turned silly-money tidal, and the art market became a glimmer of hope and ambition in the painter’s eyes.

Thomas Lawson’s essay Last Exit: Painting was published in Artforum in1981, a seminal year for painting discourse, including Douglas Crimp’s The End of Painting/ Gilles Deleuze’s The Painting Before the Painting/ and Rene Ricard’s The Radiant Child. As art, painting was in crisis — what’s new! — but as a commodity the 1980s represented the emergence and continuance of the New York art market in the painting royalty of the “pseudo-expressionists” Julian Schnabel et al. Against this green flutter of money for art and art for money, a panoply of group-painting exhibitions became a marketplace for dealers to source individual painters, a time when Wall Street and Graffiti Street coalesced in the figure of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the radiant child.

In a conversation with experimental novelist Katy Acker, French theorist Sylvère Lotringer, co-founding editor of Semiotext(e) with Kris Kraus, gives us a glimpse into the New York art scene at the time: “It was a great time. Artists were showing their work to other artists, the outside world wasn't really involved… Painters were subsidising the art world.”

Lotringer’s casual remark — Painters were subsidising the art world — obviously places painting closer to money. Who knew! Painters became necessary proxies for other artists not suited to the art market, but dependent on painters accruing value, no matter how pseudo or surplus or zombie their paintings had become, under the inflated and accelerated art market demand for paintings to decorate the elevator shaft of Trump’s growing giant golden dildo of real estate for the rich.

At The MAC things are less hedonistic and vulgar. I exit a grey, close, cold Belfast day, into a greyer, closer, yet warmer building. The Tall Gallery, one of two galleries containing cater-corned rooms within rooms, is the gallery where particular paintings make the biggest impact individually, but also act as visual anchors for the whole setting. It’s the setting see that makes the difference here, which I’ll get back to later.

Gallery to gallery, room to room, painters begin to reveal themselves through their idée fixes. Some of those obsessions are merely repetitive and formal, others are searching. It’s the searching ones that stick on the day, and haunt much, much later. Dougal McKenzie and Hugh Mulholland have curated the paintings, not the painters. Meaning, the 11 painters’ work are not segregated but shuffled between rooms. All painters are generously represented, so you get to know them inchmeal, room to room. It’s not packed. The MAC’s high altitude architecture lets the paintings breathe overhead, while they hold their breath face to face. And there are intense face-offs here, formalist moments where a low-level, low-lit tonal atmosphere wriggles against the concrete biceps and deltoids of The MAC.

Patrick Hickey, Dreamboat, 2022, oil on canvas, 140 x 210cm, photo: Simon Mills

Painting titles catch my eyes from time to time, but don’t inform the paintings much, except for one, named Dreamboat. Patrick Hickey’s three naked boy-men with superman jet and cut hair, sit-stand in a pink long-boat of Peter Doig phallic ergonomics. One boy-man tosses a net into the grey atmosphere. One looks at me. One looks away with an erect black oar. Cock. They are not fishermen, of the Hemingway kind or any other kind for that matter. They are an imaginary scenario, dreamboat by day, wet dream by night. The boat and a slender bicep cover their modesty. Desire is something hidden or out of reach here. And yet everything is out in the open , like a filleted fish. How everything is delicately and naively posed and painted adds to the painting’s authenticity and sincerity. A dream that topples on waking. Hickey’s painting manifests the Freudian dream, wherein content and form become two sides of the möbius strip of dreaming.

Juste Bernotaite, Our Heros, 2022, oil on canvas, 170 x 130cm, photo: Simon Mills

If Patrick Hickey proffers a window to the red heart of form and pale soul of content, Juste Bernotaite paints what painter Phillip Allen describes as “slab paintings”, paintings that are not windows, but all surface. Auerbach heavy with paint, the large ones, which gesture with more drawn elements in a concerted effort to overcome scale with the span of the body — shoulder to elbow to fingertip — belie the smaller ones, which feel more thumb to index to wrist. The scale and physicality of the former is coloured and knitted by an undergrowth of ochres and oranges, that release the paintings from abstracted landscape to a more playful urban or domestic playground, eliciting crayon over oil stick.

Cameron Stewart, The Old Arcade, 2022, oil on linen, 182 × 152cm, photo: Simon Mills

The same warm pallet inhabits Cameron Stewart’s paintings. And yet, if Juste Bernotaite is all surface, all slab, Stewart’s tenebristic glow comes from within, like time-machine neon transported into the period past of saloons, gun fights and the workaday Wild West or lazy tropics. His The Old Arcade is majestic and mystic, the orange glow enriched by cardinal red, viridian green and a pool of black with a starry night up high. This is the place where Stewart’s coterie of workers, actors, painters, whatever come to play under night skies. Stewart’s paintings remind me that painting feels old, older than photography, older than technology as we know it today. It’s what sets it apart. It has nothing to do with the weight of history. It’s just old. Old the minute you put paint on paint. Painting contains time and the vicissitudes of this or that.

Daniel Coleman, The House Down the Lane, 2022, oil on canvas, 270 × 200cm, photo: Simon Mills

Daniel Coleman, whose paintings I’ve been aware of for a few years now, stumped me with the scale and dark of The House Down the Lane, standing at 270 cm. The painting is a dark wall of paint, that vies Phillip Allen’s slab paintings against window paintings. Its darkness shouldn't work, as it nears a black-mirror abstraction that could subjugate the narrativity that the painting infers in the bat-cave architecture of its shelved recesses. I’m 6.6ft, and needed to stand on tippy toes to get closer to the pockets of cobalt blue and green candescence that highlight but fail to warm this icy interior, where an old rotary dial phone, a sacred-heart-Madonna and tea cups propped here and there and nowhere between a threesome of prostrate and crestfallen figures coloured by their own cold breath. The black slick of the surface reads as condensation. But Coleman has somehow pulled it from the cold embers of abstraction, if not the existential ashes. Which is okay with me.

Tim Millen, Monstera II, 2022, oil on canvas, 160 x 120cm, photo: Simon Mills

Tim Millen’s Monstera II, a strange somnolent Arcadia, not unlike the atmosphere of Peter Doig’s Blotter, slides itself into view in the transitional space between the large expanse of the Upper Gallery, where paintings become a little lost to the scale of the room, and a small back room, where Patrick Hickey’s jaundiced Jesus and lissome boy continue the trend of bare-backed bodies. Two more bare-backed figures foot Millen’s painting. They skinny-dip on a shelf of water — one humorously revealing butt cleavage cupped by water — overlooking a galloping herd of deer that range a white landscape. Millen’s paintings throughout have a quirky and direct sensibility, narrative and painting forming totems of playful and humorous relationships, both in what is painted and how it is painted.

Yasmine Robinson, Warhol's Wig, 2022, oil, acrylic, emulsion, spray paint, on recycled gillet and canvas, 50 × 40cm, photo: author

Yasmine Robinson’s Warhol's Wig, a weird little furry animal of a painting, breaks the consistency of canvas, panel and painting proper in this tribe at The MAC. It reads as bloody and oily, scalp or roadkill, Warhol dirtied and dead under the spinning tyres of art history. Robinson, more than anyone else here, questions what painting is and how it is made and essentially feels. Her paintings still hang on the wall here, and retain a perimeter, albeit broken by a pin-cushion love heart in one instance. There’s a softness to her canvases of raspberry red and pool table green, and a reckless abandon to form and colour, that feels DIY and anti-commodity and fun.

**L to R:** Megan Burns, Cameron Stewart, photo: Simon Mills

Slavka Sverakova wrote a piece on this very exhibition. She took the piecemeal, individuated approach, skirting over the context and setting, focusing directly and separately on the 11 artists selected by McKenzie and Mulholland through a 30-artists/10 month studio crawl. Sverakova has been a long-time and lone art critic in the north. I don’t pretend to know the Belfast scene as an infrequent visitor, but I viewed Slavka as an ally in the early days of adopting the orphan of art criticism in 2008, when a new agent was born out of its ashes, the art writer. That said, Sverakova’s approach is something I disbanded years ago. Although generous, and probably necessary for an insider to name not exclude, it is an obligatory approach to art criticism. It’s systematic. A framework that treats the whole cast equally with reference and word count.19-odd artists whom McKenzie and Mulholland visited in their studios didn’t make the cut, not to mention the many more who weren’t considered. This is a sample, an introduction to painting practice in the north. And although the 11 painters here form a haphazard organism — like The MAC — with one painted skin, there’s depth found in a few that ulcerate and acne the surface of my eyes. Jacques Lacan writes:

“...an interpretation can only be an interpretation by being...an interpretation...nor is it a way of getting rid of depth, for it is on the surface that depth is seen, as when one's face breaks out in pimples on holidays.”

L to R: Hannah Casey-Brogan, Jane Rainey, Cameron Stewart, photo: Simon Mills

As someone who has experienced and written on several exhibitions dedicated to Irish painting during and post pandemic, including DUBLINERS: Zagreb, 2021/ GENERATIONS: NEW IRISH PAINTING, Butler Gallery, 2022/ and IN AND OF ITSELF: ABSTRACTION IN THE AGE OF IMAGES, RHA Dublin, 2022/23, what I can say days later after exiting The MAC, is the painters selected for NEW EXITS, and presented as they are in the setting of The MAC, have a commonality that was absent from the other exhibitions listed above, except for the RHA, where commonality was unavoidable under the exclusive approach of abstraction.

**L to R: Juste Bernotaite, Cameron Stewart, photo: Simon Mills**

This commonality, in mood and tenor, is hard to define. It could be the curators, the selection, the Belfast School of Art connection. It could be put down to a kind of hard-border provincialism, and what I guess is a close-knit art scene, still dependent on an artist-run grass-roots foundations. I have been promulgating for years that painters should form a cult.

Relatively speaking, down south the paintings have the tone (both in medium and message) of saccharine Raphael, whereas up here gnarly Grünewald is in the house. It definitely has something to do with tonal values of the paintings, and the pushing of those tonal values beyond what is comfortable and looks good on Instagram. It also has something to do with scale and the setting of the exhibition.

**L to R:** Kwok Tsui, Jane Rainey, photo: Simon Mills

Psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis state that “fantasy is not the object of desire, but its setting.” I find this fascinating in relation to painting, and how the settings for art are so fundamental to the experience of art, the fantasy of art. Artists cannot think about this phenomenon, as they have to believe in their objects in and of themselves as the conductors of emotion and meaning and method, not an arbitrary and often-times compromised setting.

L to R: Aimee Melaugh, Tim Millen, photo: Simon Mills

I remember a painter friend of mine getting on to me about how I experience painting in relation to its setting, in a way that determines its success and failure, rather than experiencing painting in and of itself, as an object, or commodity, or digital image on Instagram. That is perhaps why the loss of the setting on social media is so great (to my mind) — the real object of desire has been replaced by a fantasy, a fantasy that will always win the day in the mind of the one who depends on fantasy to live, and not life, physical life, to fantasise. Painting has become not only commodified on Instagram, and physically disembodied, but its physical setting has also been cropped from existence. I am including the Artists Support Pledge in this commodification.

Although I have exhibited, lecturered, and launched a publication in the North, Belfast is an odd Lacanian holiday away from home; home being a place that induces sickness when far away from it, but boredom when in it. The residual effect of nausea and boredom is the best way to approach an exhibition of paintings. Painting is not a consumable thing, but an awkward and ungainly thing, like humans, like Warhol’s Wig. Painting is the antithesis of Instagram. It neither fits the eyes nor mouth. It has a dentist’s approach. And it is with all these disjunctions, between place, between paintings, that I wander out of The MAC’s warren of anti-chambers with my hand in my mouth🏴—James Merrigan

New Exits through 26 March