One lunchtime last week, before the awardees were announced, I wandered accidentally & contextually unaware through the exhibition of shortlisted paintings for the Hennessy Craig Award & Homan Potterton Award at the RHA. I learnt later that the 10 painters shortlisted for the award were sourced from the 2022 and 2023 Annual Exhibitions at the RHA. Hence, it is very much an in-house & slow-burn selection process, that winds up & down over a couple of years.

My visit was the opposite of slow-burn. On the day of visiting I hadn’t much time on my side; art & words were not on the agenda; & the clamour of drills & hammers during the installation of exhibitions opening that same week at the RHA was all around. I didn’t even know it was the shortlist exhibition, until an artist friend shared the news of the two winners over coffee a few days later. Only then did I join the dots & the noughts —4 noughts preceded by a 2. A sizeable sum of money for one art award, not to mention two, in any cultural context, here or abroad.

It is no surprise that the Hennessy Craig & Homan Potterton Awards are specifically & exclusively dedicated to supporting painting, as bequeaths of estates of painters & the once director of the National Gallery of Ireland respectively. Such a painting legacy also says something about the painting establishment in this country, a culture that is still very conservative when it comes to placing market & mainstream value on other art processes & mediums besides painting.

Yet painters might argue that, even though painting has more commercial outlets — including zombie galleries & doom-scrolling Instagram — the Arts Council is more art project-oriented than art object-oriented in its public funding preferences. Painting may be the capitalist cogs upon which other art mediums are tolerated & exist, but can painting be radical anymore when its theoretical death didn’t come to pass after the high-flying art market tucked it under its wing? A question for another day…

Two of the shortlisted artists, Ciara Roche & Casey Walshe, whose work I had experienced relatively recently in the commercial space of the RHA, the Ashford Gallery, makes it all feel very groomed & in-house. And yet it is these two artists in particular, who, on my grapevine anyway, have been talked about above & beyond the confines of the RHA in the last 5 to 10 years.

Further, they are two artists who I believe are confronting & overcoming the doubts that painting can still transform painting anew, if not the world. And for that reason, stand out in the shortlist, especially considering the claim that the shortlist is based “on the overall practice of the artist”.

But what does “overall practice” really mean beyond the other rigid award criteria: “under 35 years of age”; “studied at a recognised art college on the island of Ireland”; and — for the Homan Potterton — “style acknowledges the tradition of painting figurative or landscape subjects”?

I say this with no disrespect to the winners Stephanie Deady (Hennessy Craig Award 2024) & Fiach McGuinness (Homan Potterton Award, 2024). Everyone will have their favourites & opinion; I’m just writing mine down. My favourites & opinion is contextually coloured (like the judges) by so many moments, not to mention the fleeting experience I had of the exhibition last week. However, I still hold Willem de Kooning’s comment about the experience of painting in relation to content: “Content is the glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.”

Ciara Roche, The Waiting Room, Oil on canvas, 110 x 150cm, 2023

So what makes Ciara Roche’s & Casey Walshe’s paintings so talked about these last few years in the Irish arts scene? Visually, they are antithetical to one another, except for the cold blue-red spectrum through which both painters look through the mirror of culture & self, darkly. Roche is a figurative painter, well suited to the context of the RHA (& the award criteria); Walshe is an abstract-figurative painter, more recently leaning into minimalist abstraction in her limited choice of colour & form.

There is a haunting polyfold mirroring & temporality in Roche’s paintings of furnished interiors, wherein we are brought back & forward in time to collapse nostalgia & the future, romance & desire, real & surreal, in one fell swoop of the brush. Roche’s The Waiting Room, her big statement in the shortlist, is an uncanny juxtaposition of an aquarium with goldfish & wet-on-wet office chairs waiting for someone, something, to enter, exit, or maybe for memory to return.

We can theoretically pigeonhole Waiting Room in 1990’s Marc Augé’s “non-place”, where identity, desire & the social is depleted of all energy. But Roche’s painting oozes all those things. In that sense I would call the artist a conceptual painter, ignoring the fact that light is the genesis of her work. Intellectually, it is how, what & where light alights upon the modern world that makes all the conceptual & formalist difference in her paintings.

Casey Walshe, Kisses from Paris, Oil on canvas, 183 × 183cm, 2024

While Roche’s paintings attract, Casey Walshe’s paintings “retract” at the moment of desire, by proffering melancholic vignettes in the bruised colour field of red, dark blue & white, recalling Jasper John’s radical paintings of the American flag. The unusual word “retract”, which Walshe uses in their artist statement, means to “draw back” — she retracted her hand as if she'd been burnt.

Similar to Roche, whose paintings invoke an event that hasn’t yet happened & never will happen in the stilted universe of painting, Walshe’s use of “retract” could suggest a defensive structuring of content with regard to the formalist gestures of their abstractions; one where desire is boxed off or in; or kept secret — a secret about a secret as Diane Arbus put it — in an architecture where desire peeks out but is not solicited. Walshe’s melancholic & voyeuristic Kisses from Paris, measuring a physical 183 × 183 cms, pushes you back with abstraction while pulling you forward with flowers; whereas Roche’s Waiting Room invites you to sit.

But these are just words, albeit words that come with a critical compulsion to respond — the award results just brought my opinion & words regarding Roche & Walshe’s paintings into focus.

Beside my own physical experiences, both at the RHA & Mother’s Tankstation Limited in solo presentations of her work, no painter has been mentioned more in my classroom than Ciara Roche. Art students recognise something in Roche’s paintings that is influential & permissive. There is something compulsive, twisted & dark in the artist’s painted meditations on display in commercial, domestic, filmic & transitional spaces, that reflects the consumerist & imagistic culture we continue to sleep with as enemies & lovers.

Walshe, on the other hand, elicits questions, ones that perturb appreciation & produce vex talk. There is something primordially direct, especially in the artist’s recent adoption of a blue, red & white palette, that goes against painted representation, to speak of something painted on the surface of a secret, of ritual, of religion, of temples that were once painted & distinct from the earth upon which they stood, until entropy erased their identity to sand, to dust.

Both artists speak of desire. You can love a Ciara Roche for obvious reasons, & desire a Casey Walshe from the seat of the unconscious. But beyond this personal take on their paintings, I have viewed their work from afar through the eyes & voices & debate about their influence with other artists in the art scene. They are two painters who have consistently evolved their perspectives on the world & their painted psyche. Not winning the award only serves to make my memories & opinion more reified in the aquarium that is their paintings, where goldfish loop, temples effloresce, & an interior world manifests memory & meaning that eventually dies with the deceased & forgotten🏴

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