Alan Phelan likes words. The artist uses words both precisely and perversely to complicate his things. He is one of our best writers on art in the playfully critical Wayne Koestenbaum vein. The words that inhabit his work – energetically abbreviated and pointed, but promiscuously flirtatious with meanings – hone in on the handsy materiality of his objects, which collapse and conjoin in an amorphous play between thoughts and things while never settling on either (i.e., Once Phelan titled a series of works “Cabbages and Things” influenced by – among many, many other things – The Thing from The Fantastic Four).

There's a particular handsiness and craftiness (in words and material) to Phelan's sculpture – something I have personally missed in his detour and détournement into the photographic and filmic of recent years. When thinking of his work, past and present, I cannot shake his earlier papier-mâché sculptures and a specific reference to Odo from Star Trek Deep Space Nine, the changeling who couldn't shape-shift properly. (*Side note: Odo's purest form was simple liquid but his failed endeavour to mimic the human form was his desire. As Plato claimed, the poets (artists and I suppose Odo) are bad imitators of reality.)

Like Plato's poets or Star Trek's Odo, Alan Phelan is a bad imitator of reality. His things stick out from reality to align with Aristotle's notion of art as being not how reality is but how it ought to be. His latest work, a giant, colourful and again handsy candle holder with Play-Doh precision displayed on a plinth flanked by slender and black lolly-pop head street-lights outside Dublin City Hall in the surrounding splendour of Georgian architecture continues this meeting and marriage between things and thoughts in the odd title of the work “RGB Sconce, Hold Your Nose,” a title that brings some RGB light to some marvellous hidden histories from colonial Dublin.

In this new sculpture, strayed from the gallery and spawned in the most public of spheres – City Hall and that yellow latticed junction of bus and passerby, Phelan's “RGB” reference is transposed from a body of work the artist has been working on (and exhibited) for several years (and in several spaces) via his committed revival of an obsolete method of photography, The Joly Screen Process, invented in Ireland in the 1890s by John Joly. Phelan writes somewhere that every colour can be mixed from red, green and blue (RGB). Obviously Phelan is referring to light not pigment, hence the candle holder, or “sconce” (a typical Phelan word), to denote a decorative and bracketed tool for light in times and places when there was none. Today there is no escape from light so Phelan's candle holder becomes a metaphor for other things, such as emancipation, transparency, liberty and hope. That said, the artist's candle holder performs thingfully as pigment but thoughtfully as light, and so double binds become double entendres in a doubling up between what we see and what we imagine, what we can touch and what we desire, what is symbolic and what is allegory.

The word “sconce” has more to it than meets the eye or the mind too. From old French, esconse can be translated as “lantern, hiding place.” Whereas abscondre – “to hide” originates from the Latin abscondere “to hide, conceal, put out of sight.” It's very complicated (but fun if you are into this type of thing) in terms of the words that denote the things in Phelan’s art. This hyperlinked etymology is counter-intuitive to what a candle holder does in the world, show the way, especially “sconce”: a bracketed candle holder attached to a wall for a torch or candle. Obviously, “hiding place” or to “put out of sight” also plays into the subtitle of the work which, if you do your homework (in the artist's words) “refers to a collection of ‘sanitary songs’ that was published during the 1884 Dublin Castle Scandal, located in the adjacent building complex which was the site of the British colonial administration. Irish Nationalists revealed homosexual activities of high-ranking British civil servants, using this as proof of corrupt and immoral British rule. The poetry pamphlet instructs ‘decent men’ to ‘hold their noses’ so not to breath in the perceived debauchery of the castle.”

Now... if you are one of those New Critics or Object Orientated Ontologists who believe art or objects exist in and of themselves, autonomous from the world in which they inhabit in the appreciation, interpretation and experience of them in the world, then Phelan's candle holder, sconce or whatever you want to call it, will rise up out of the grey city as a colourful, somewhat gaudy and kitsch sculpture to inflame or douse you as you pass by. Without words or context you may pick up on the RGB and foliage that snakes up the arms of this thing. Stall your bike or stride you might notice the form of the sculpture has a tactile appearance like that of hand-raised pastry. From across the road you might even pick up on the contrasting classical and straight architecture that helps to project this kindergarten splat forward from its grey institutional perch directly beneath and opposite the Georgian buildings' plasterwork and marvelous hidden histories that inspired it. You might even speculate towards some reference to light or liberty in the upward thrust of its historical purpose and form. But contemporary art comes with passengers and baggage, and they are called context, history, and us.

Can we desire Phelan's new play thing outside City Hall? Surely not! Is it a matter of taste? No! The sculpture does that thing that Andy Warhol did so well by vying taste against desire, so we are left unstuck. The threesome of red, green and blue work as light, or with light, but not pigment. The RGB of Phelan's John Joly screens is lovely because it disguises the monster with three backs, a ménage à hulk, devil, smurf. Here RGB wrestles rather than blends in Baroque drama and Rococo frivolity. It's like modern art has once again become a victim of a nutcase's bucket of paint (three in this instance); the artist anticipates offence before it can be performed.

Alan Phelan’s sculpture at City Hall is not a symbol, like Lady Liberty, but a free-floating allegory drenched in signification. It’s cloaked in ideas of emancipation from the back alleyways of history and the sensible redescription of those histories in unlikely and unwieldy forms that can melt the heart but will invariably melt the mind. What RGB Sconce uncovers is the silhouette of history, a candle that shines a light upon itself to demystify and liberate itself from symbolism, from one meaning or message, from us tasting and desiring machines. This is not a healthy classical sculpture – like the grey civic building that looms behind it with a bad taste in its mouth – but an unhealthy baroque one. It disrobes its pluralism in plain sight, a sad clown wearing a flasher's rain-mack underneath red, green and blue makeup with a knowing smile. Layers.

—James Merrigan