“Perhaps I would have liked to own a coffee machine, but as soon as I made the painting, I no longer felt the desire. Perhaps I never really had the desire at all, and I might be a little annoyed at the world for tricking me into thinking that I did. ”

— from Mother's Tankstation press release – "Extracted from emailed practice notes from the artist.")

“My position is that ideology is fashion anyway, and for the last two centuries most of our bloody global comedies have begun with our inability to distinguish our desires from our tastes. It’s hard to sort them out, but we know when they are not in tune. ”

— From Dave Hickey's "Pirates and Farmers" 2013)

CIARA ROCHE, MOTHER’S TANKSTATION LIMITED, DUBLIN.

“It's picture postcard perfect!” says the person who grew up in the rural idyll, but somehow escaped to tell the hell of the not so “picture postcard” tale. The phrase itself denotes prettiness or perfection. Why is it holiday makers standing in the tourist gift shop, flipping through the postcards like vinyl records, already lost in nostalgia before the holiday is over, end up choosing the picture postcard to… what? It's superficiality is as super thin as the card it is printed on. Does it represent their holidays? The rolling green fields… the thatched cottages… the blue skies… the white picket-fences… the salmon-filled rivers… the unmarked leaping lambs as they really are? Or is it rather the ideal they want to project outward rather than inward, an ideal image that is a tad greener, bluer, whiter, fluffier than the landscape they are presently standing and shitting in?

CIARA ROCHE, (L-R) HOME STUDY 12 | 11, oil on paper, 15 X 21cm, 2020.

“Picture postcard” is a criticism wrapped in a term of endearment. It describes a reality that lacks criticism, lacks truth, lacks fault, lacks lack. If you are one of those observers who want critique, truth, fault, or lack embedded somewhere in your images of the world, like artists do, then you are going to hate what the picture postcard represents: an aesthetic lie. It intimates perfection without the rigour – it just is. Those of us who grew up in rural idylls (like me) use this term of endearment savagely, because they (like me) know the truth that lies behind, beneath and beyond the picture postcard. Those who escaped the picture-postcard's white-picket-fence smile and green, green grass welcome mat are those who finally acknowledged the severed finger hiding in the manicured lawn.

Ciara Roche paints small and detailed but not at the expense of paint, which she mops around, wet and thick on the floors, walls, and delineations of furniture, foliage and lingerie of peopleless interiors at Dublin's Mother's Tankstation. They come across as studies for bigger, more ambitious and complete things down the line. They are small paintings with big dreams and desires, paintings that you might walk past if contextually framed by the very interiors that Ciara paints: café and shop interiors, garden centres, or a stray service station, somewhere, nowhere. But here, at Mother's Tankstation, they make their presence felt, hanging from paper tabs nailed to the gallery wall. Hanging low and explicitly from those dot-punched paper tabs, one after another, side-by-side, Ciara’s paintings are breezy vehicles that catch the light and colour of objects with a tip-toeing brush. Painted full, edge to edge, they are hemmed in by paint, doors, plants, mannequin busts and butts, pulling us this way and that way by brush strokes rather than the gloss of pictorial illusion. Predominantly on primed card, they are not lazy paintings; they restlessly fill the field, buckled corner to buckled corner, stroke by stroke. The paint sits opaque or translucent in their inchoate reality that, in successive instances, is signed by consumer desire – “Very Sexy” – which whispers in cursive script beside tight lingerie hiked up on Boxing Helena mannequins. Paint squirrels around everyday and luxurious objects, décolletaged by desire like Cinderella sweeping up dust before the dance.

BOXING HELENA (1993), directed by Jennifer Lynch – “A rich surgeon (Julian Sands) operates on the object of his obsession, his disfigured and aloof neighbour (Sherilyn Fenn). “

Time ticks in these paintings too, when light creeps up a wall full with clocks. But it is the pin-pricking impasto of artificial light found in the brake lights of the jauntily parked Jag under the sweeping grey/green service station canopy – AbEx in illusory scale – that makes these paintings glow with an unsettling imperfection. The same light that Ciara paints is also present today in the gallery, found creeping up and across her paintings, meta in too many ways to mention. The pitched gallery roof with its exposed rafters and skylights from which the sunny June day shatters the gallery in white and yellow, almost makes this feel like Maine, New England… the exemplar of the picture postcard. The forever 8-foot high gallery partitions that divide private from public look different with Clara's paintings pinned to them – thinner somehow. This is significant: art subjugating the gallery space rather than the other way around. The veneered wall behind the black gallery stove and pipe, the slick chest of drawers, the garage door, the cubby holes that peek and crop this world in its two-faced origami of private and public, institution and domestic, create a relationship with Ciara's paintings that is almost… perfect. Picture postcard? How can we transform “picture postcard” – as Ciara has in paint – into something that is a less offensive descriptor in terms of serious art? Or do we have to? I think we do. The picture postcard, although political in its ideology, is too on the side of its denial of truth and the fantasy that denial perpetuates. Art is a tell tale tattler that rattles reality. It upsets the applecart, overturning Wayne Thiebaud's just desserts.

WAYNE THIEBAUD, PIE COUNTER, 1963. (WHITNEY)

We can split painters into three groups: painters who digest; painters who desire; and painters who do both. Contra popular opinion, Wayne Thiebaud paints both (that's another story). Ciara paints both too. The lingerie displays, the makeup and appliance stands, the Winter garden centre, Ikea, and the rooms from which Ciara's own desires are dreamt up, questioned and painted in the light of day, her home – it's all here. Not to forget the obvious desire realised in this show, an artist exhibiting for the first time, solo, at the most desired gallery in Dublin, Mother's Tankstation. Desire is all around, which puts desire firmly in the eyes and the gut of the person that knows that fact. But where is the digestive tract? The waste? The severed finger?

CIARA ROCHE, WINTER SERVICE STATION, oil on canvas, 18 X 24, 2020.

The thing that turns the gut here is the compositional stress and slant that Ciara places on what would be otherwise picture postcards. There is an asymmetry to her compositions, like real life. Her paintings could be mistaken for picture postcards because they are paintings after all, ideological representations of the world that should – in the popular view, like the best selling art postcard, Monet’s Water Lilies – aspire to beauty (not Dave Hickey's definition of beauty which starts with Helen and ends in the Trojan War). There is what I can only describe as a turn in Ciara's paintings, which creates a turn in the eye, like Cézanne did to us all those years ago when he desired to see every side of a plate of oranges in one painting. Ikea displays are not really odd in real life, but an Ikea display – cut from its context – as a subject to paint is odd. The same with a Winter garden centre with a solitary knocked-over plant pot, or a service station from a peculiar angle with a Jag parked off square, brake lights on, somehow transforming this inanimate luxury item into the personification of aloofness or loneliness, like Dash Snow's night photograph of a SHELL gas station missing its S.

DASH SNOW, UNTITLED (HELL), digital c-print, 50.8 by 50.8 cm. 2005.

Ciara is also doing that Warholian thing of the multiple in her studies of shop displays of appliances which, like service stations and garden centres, always seem destitute in their segregated sameness.

Here we have the radios! The toasters are over there! And not to forget the SMEG line back over there.

Misery may love company but so do appliances – the multiple is the factory of desire. Warhol's multiples ended up being desired because there are many not few. The same goes for SMEG toasters, lingerie, Thiebaud's cakes. We see them in the store, multiplied and coloured for your individual taste, creating a desire that, when we return home with just one, is somehow lacking. Warhol loaded the dice with Marilyns to satisfy the lack that just one Marilyn would bring upon the consumer. Heart maybe, but 'home' is not where desire is found – what a welcome mat that would make!

CIARA ROCHE, IKEA STUDY 3, 15 X 21cm, 2020.

Ciara Roche’s idée fixe (like every painter) may be the light, colour and forms these inanimate objects and stages proffer her small paint brush, but what this viewer is left with is both paint (the heavy impasto'd skirting board and door jam that cuts the brown home interior) and the artist’s alternating full and empty interiors that turn gut and eye with the help of a conveyor belt curation.

Through 3rd July 2021.

—James Merrigan