Pre-press mailchimp text as artists’ statement:
The List and The Line
Mark Swords and Alan Phelan
at the Casino Marino
This exhibition brings together two very different art practices in a site specific and responsive installation at Casino Marino. Both artists interconnect conflicting histories through the act of making — with complex collage paintings, layered Joly screen photographs, text works, assemblages and sculptures. The personal is thrown together with the national, consumerism is jumbled with colonialism, visual narratives tumble into abstraction, and pleasure is maybe more pizza box than portico perfection.
Over the last century in Ireland, as imperialism was replaced by nationalism, this unique building endured despite what seems like active neglect. The new Irish state was not very forgiving and gobbled up the estate the building was part of for social housing, deals with the Catholic church to build an orphanage, GAA pitches filling the 5-walled garden, rail lines, golf clubs and more, leaving only a small lawn around the Casino.
The Casino is not denounced in our time as an absurd folly or a monument to imperial excess and extravagance, but rather it is celebrated as an unlikely architectural gem and national treasure. Built as a pleasure-house, this little maison de plaisance or lustschloss, as described elsewhere, is so much more than kitchen, dining room and bedroom. The Greek origin of the word archive is arkheion, meaning house or abode. In its conception and design this casino, or little house, was a fusion of antiquity and early modern style. Now it can be an archive of other potential histories.
Where the Earl, James Caulfield partied, we now also play. In the initial selection of works there were so many direct visual connections with shapes and textures, exotic plants & animals, and indeed parallel symbolism. To this were added new works, responding to and sometimes working against the thematics of specific rooms. The List and the Line is where both artists meet, beyond stripes and potential inventories, to find a way to structure our thinking on this incredible place.
Alan Phelan and Mark Swords
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OPW Press release
Press release generated mostly by ChatGPT
OPW and Casino Marino Welcome an Exciting Collaboration of Artistic Practices – The List and The Line exhibition
Published on
Last updated on
Casino Marino, one of Europe’s most esteemed neoclassical buildings, is set to host an unprecedented art exhibition, bringing together two divergent artistic practices in a captivating installation. The exhibition, titled “The List and The Line – new and recent work by Alan Phelan and Mark Swords,” promises to be a transformative experience, intertwining conflicting narratives and challenging conventional perceptions through the creative endeavours of two remarkable artists.
Renowned for their innovative techniques and bold conceptualizations, the featured artists, Alan Phelan and Mark Swords draw inspiration from a rich tapestry of art historical context, seamlessly blending tradition with contemporary expression. Through an array of complex collage paintings, layered Joly screen photographs, assemblages, and sculptures, they invite visitors to embark on a journey through intertwining histories, reinterpreting familiar narratives in a fresh and thought-provoking light.
Samir Eldin, OPW National Historic Properties and General Manager of Casino Marino remarked,
“At the heart of this exhibition lies a profound exploration of the intersections between art, history, and identity. By juxtaposing contrasting elements and challenging established norms, the artists invite us to reconsider our understanding of heritage and legacy in a rapidly evolving world. As stewards of cultural heritage, we are proud to provide a platform for artists to engage with our shared history and contribute to the ongoing narrative of artistic expression.”
As visitors traverse the rooms of Casino Marino, they will encounter a captivating dialogue between past and present, tradition and innovation. From the lavish Georgian motifs adorning the walls to the intricate marquetry floors, each detail serves as a backdrop for the artists’ creative interpretations, echoing the rich legacy of artistic patronage and cultural exchange.
Drawing upon themes of personal narrative, national identity, and socio-political commentary, the exhibition offers a dynamic exploration of the complexities inherent in contemporary art practice. Through their evocative imagery and thought-provoking symbolism, the artists challenge viewers to confront pressing issues such as consumerism, colonialism, and the evolving nature of visual storytelling.
From the whimsical musings of Alan Phelan to the introspective reflections of Mark Swords, the exhibition promises to ignite the imagination and stimulate conversation among art enthusiasts, historians, and curious minds alike. Through its innovative approach to curating and storytelling, “The List and The Line” invites visitors to reconsider the role of art in shaping our understanding of the world around us.
For further information, please contact pressoffice@opw.ie . Images available at pressoffice@opw.ie .
Listing Information
Exhibition: The List and The Line Exhibition
Venue: Casino Marino, Malahide Road, Dublin 3, D03 HH70
Dates: Running from 13 April to 29 July 2024
Open daily: 10.00 – 16.00
Admission: Free
Website: www.casinomarino.ie
Tel: 01 833 1618
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James Merrigan text in Brochure
ENTER EMPIRE
…the history of things to come… Sarah Connor, The Terminator: Judgment Day, 1991
This is not a catalogue essay, or a history lesson. It is a critical confrontation with a question I have on the occasion of an exhibition at a Dublin heritage site by two artists, Alan Phelan and Mark Swords:
What does it mean to make, place and be solicited by contemporary art in a heritage site (i.e., history)? Is this an occasion of contemporary art, or merely decoration?
The heritage site in question is named the Casino at Marino, a Neoclassical temple designed in 1759 for James Caulfield, 1st Earl of Charlemont by Sir William Chambers, doing what postmodern architecture has been doing for the last 50 years, borrowing the culture of the past, augmenting it, and putting it back onto the present, like Doric columns and golden eagles on a 1970’s semi-detached.
And yet we have been postmodern ever since the Roman rebooted the Greeks. That fact is not in question. The question in question is: Is something lost in the translation, what some call the original context, motivation, passion, soul of cultural production? And if so, what is lost in the shuffle of past and present?
Words like “shuffle” come easy when discussing a building named Casino (“Little House” in Italian; “gambling establishment” in English). The cards shuffled in this pleasure house during its colonial conception were dealt by the lords if not ladies of the manor. The Casino provided R&R for the few who ruled and harvested the resources and cultures of others, reified in the Casino’s five-pointed star parquet floor (presented in the Casino as facsimile lino), but underneath made from marquetry and now extinct wood colonised from the near and far reaches of the British Empire.
The so-called “little house” built on the big house of colonialism seems like the biggest excess. From a distance the Casino Marino is modest relative to the mother that gave birth to it. But this is an illusion; an aesthetic indulgence of the privileged. Up close the devil is in the unfolding detail. The little house becomes (pick your Empire metaphor) a Tardis, a Matryoshka, a star-spangled Pentagon. What looks like one grand door fitting of the rhizomatic roots of colonialism, is in fact a small door within a big door. What looks like one storey with one room, is in fact three stories and sixteen rooms. If there is anything functional here, like the column drain pipes, it is disguised by the decorative.
Yet beyond the leisure and pleasure economy of the colonial class, far, far away from the Little House on the Prairie, the modern English word ‘casino’, located underneath its idyllic and modest Italian etymology, interests me most in respect to the two artists, Phelan and Swords, who are partly responding to this building with its architectural slights of hands. If we dramatise the clandestine and subterranean gambling activity that might take place in such an establishment, casino in today’s parlance suggests a den of possible iniquity. The modern casino spins on a die.
If we use “cathartic effect” to question Phelan and Swords’ proposal to exhibit in this space, not just as an opportunity to carefully curate work within the display constraints of a heritage site, but to conceptually and aesthetically reflect and interrupt the socio-historical mythology that eminent tour guides will surely perform during the summer months run of the exhibition, we might get a little closer to why institutional constraints and limits lead us to produce and experience aesthetic catharsis.
Speaking with the artists, who are responding to the Casino with both existing and new work, they talk of history, mending and repair. The artists, wrapped up in their own personal histories and contemporary anxieties, have been invited to transpose onto this jewel in the crown that casts colonial shadows in all directions, a building celebrated today for its architecture and survival of wars and rebellions that transitioned this country from colony to independence.
The shadow of the history is deepest outside the exterior walls of the building. Inside the Casino is the soft underbelly of Empire; a dollhouse interior held fast in a fist of stone. Stripped of its exterior stone walls and pillars, we are left with a house linked by winding stairs and secret doors. Without walls we can navigate the claustrophobic colonial history of the building. To move on, it almost seems necessary to burlesque and Barbie the Casino’s historical heft and architectural excesses.
This is not the building’s fault, its very survival tells us so. The Casino is innocent under the cover of its facsimile lino, designed by a lively imagination that, in a leisure-class induced frenzy, eliminated all right-angles and shadows from his fretwork and plasterwork empire.
The artists also play innocent. Like all artists, Phelan and Swords have to navigate institutional space, its socio-political histories and market affiliations. In their works they respond to the Casino setting in words and a panoply of forms. Their response, especially existing works, is formalist and curated. Art objects—from paintings to pebbles—catch your eye on the floors, sills, corridors, secret rooms and vitrines that can easily be missed at first glance. This can all be read and appreciated as a fairytale romance; Phelan and Swords and the third wheel-house of imperium excess. And we can enjoy the formal invention of the past, alongside the present inventiveness of its current inhabitants.
That said, culture doesn’t sit comfortably within a civilisation of discontent, no matter how pretty that civilisation became to be under its ruling class. Yet the ruling class, in their moments of R&R, have an eye for art. Art and the ruling class go bejewelled hand in bejewelled hand. Phelan and Swords’ artworks sit well here. So well they have to be discovered, inset as they are in a setting so replete with detail and decoration that it becomes a treasure hunt of ah and oh interpolation.
What cathartic effect or aesthetic of arousal undergirds Phelan & Swords’ motivation to exhibit work at the Casino Marino? Is it significant that both artists are represented by commercial galleries, where other display constraints present objects for sale in a white cube? Is the Casino Marino a novel opportunity to display work in a setting that is not refrigerated from the outside world, but comes with its own aesthetic? And more generally, what pleasure does the artist get from the public display of their work in either commercial or heritage spaces?
Contemporary art is built upon both a rejection of the institution and its acceptance. Artists, like the masochist under the whip of the hired dominant hand, are contractually obligated and aesthetically motivated by the constraints and limits of the Law. The fleeting moment of art needs a house, a home, a museum to protect it from here into perpetuity. But what is art after the event of its lively and public intrusion upon the world? What does art become? An object? A memory? An artefact that represents a time, a people, a place, a class, a race, a trauma… When the artists speak of mending and repair (we can include ‘reparation’ here) in the colonial context of its display, would a more felt cathartic effect and response be the razing of the Casino Marino out of existence?
Culture’s conservation as dusty civilisation, or civilisation’s subjugation as lively culture? In an imaginary sense, the word “casino”, presided over by the uptight and tightlipped functionary of the eighteenth-century Casino, versus the gasping heart and sweaty brain of the modern casino goer and gambler, summons time travel. The casino of time’s past and present brings to mind the risk and radicality and catharsis of the gamble of contemporary art. To gamble the present and the future on the throw of a dice, or on the flip of a card, is a radical act; to make art in the present without distance, reflection and history on your side is also a radical act. There is nothing to lose: the present is all that matters; the future reception of art by the public is speculative at best in the artist’s absence. Artists are forever throwing dice. What sign the die lands on is dependent on where you stand in relation to where the die lies.
James Merrigan emerged as both an artist and art critic during the 2008 financial crash amidst an efflorescent blog culture. He continues to write under the frequency and critically confessional definition of an art blog. He cut his critical teeth as an independent, with a DIY back catalogue of online and printed identities, including +billion-journal and Fugitive Papers. He teaches at Gorey School of Art, and lectures in Psychoanalysis and Art at Trinity College Dublin.
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Credits
Special thanks to Samir Eldin, General Manager, Grace McMahon, NHP OPW; Siobhán Treacy, Supervisor Guide, OPW; Barry Byrne, BMS OPW; Ken Mooney, NHP OPW and Adrian Kelly, Curator, OPW. The artists would like to thank all involved from the OPW for their assistance on the exhibition as well as Naomi Lowe, Charlotte Swords and Julian Swords; Noel Kelly, ESS Archive, Small Night Projects. All works by Alan Phelan courtesy the artist and The Molesworth Gallery; all works by Mark Swords courtesy the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery; and the lenders to the exhibition. Brochure design: Alan Phelan. Photography: Louis Haugh: Printing: Printrun, Dublin.
ABOUT CASINO MARINO
Casino Marino is one of Europe’s best neoclassical buildings dedicated to the Arts. It was designed in 1759 as a Pleasure House for James Caul eld, 1st Earl of Charlemont by Sir William Chambers, one of the finest architects of the time. Charlemont and Chambers created a unique and intriguing Garden Temple from which to overlook the magnificent panorama of Dublin Bay.
The Casino, meaning ‘small house’, surprises visitors as they discover the remarkable secrets of this architectural gem. The lavishly decorated and compact exterior cleverly disguises an interior of intimate rooms displaying intricately ornate Georgian motifs. Richly patterned marquetry floors and beautifully executed plasterwork act as an historical backdrop to the Casino’s past which is lovingly brought to life by our friendly and knowledgeable tour guides.
Cared for by the OPW, Casino Marino is regarded internationally as a building of exquisite craftsmanship and great architectural signifcance, continuing the legacy of Lord Charlemont’s vision and his gift to the nation.
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Full list of works in the exhibition
Alan Phelan (AP) Mark Swords (MS)
Basement
Reception (room on entry)
– Dot Banana, 2021 (AP)
– Lily Reynaud Dewar as Twister Morph 2015, when sitting was dancing, 2019, and when she didn’t know what a conceptual artist looked like
– Dot Bird, 2020 (AP)
– Dot Pineapple, 2021 (AP)
Joly screen photographs in large display case. Each one comprises of toned gelatin silver sheet film (reverse processed), duraclear c-print screen, acrylic panels, LED panel, MDF support, electrics, archival paper tape, insulation tape, steel and rubber profiles, (coloured paper), each 25.3 x 25.3 x 5.5 cm
Old Scullery (with cased model of former estate and dado rail)
Special Offer, 2018 (MS)
acrylic on canvas, 71 x 47 cm
Word Wall, 2020 (MS)
Tipex on A3 hardback notebook, 30 x 42 cm
Corridor (in front of door to Butler’s Room/Office)
Dot Satellite, 2020 (AP)
Joly screen photograph in scale display case on metal box
Main Old Kitchen (with copper pot display)
Dot Oranges, 2020 (AP)
Joly screen photograph in ball display case on metal box
Zig Zag Girl, 2024 (MS)
various materials on painted bedside lockers, approx 180 x 50 x 50 cm
Panty (with sink)
Three primary forms 1919-1933, does this point more clearly to the fourth
dimension, or just the end of the world? (rose) 2019 (AP)
Joly screen photograph in scale display case on metal box
Boardgame, 2024 (MS)
various materials, 2 x 29 x 29 cm
Pantry (room with fire extinguishers)
Ted’s House, 2019 (MS)
various materials on canvas, 139 x 166 cm
Exterior basement gated tunnel
The Other Hand of Victory, 2009 (AP)
white marble, 40 x 40 x 60 cm
Placed in numerous locations throughout the building
Elements from a Cosmic Garden, 2024 (MS)
acrylic on found stones, various sizes
Main Floor
Vestibule (at front door)
Two psychic animals, 2012 (AP)
black marble, porcupine 22 x 13 x 32 cm, red river hog 22 x 22 x 32 cm
Blue Salon
Larry Larry, 2022 (AP)
framed screen print on paper, 67 x 56 cm
List, 2022 (MS)
various materials on board 65 x 55 cm
He turned to Joseph and appeared invaluable for once, 2023 (AP)
acrylic and ink on canvas, tray framed, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
Tony says he only knows what he can believe, 2023 (AP)
acrylic and ink on canvas, tray framed, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
Homage to Lost Lids, 2024 (AP)
cardboard lids, papier-mâché, painted printed ribbon, 25 x 35 x 15 cm
RGBCCTB, 2023 (ribbon jacket), 2023 (AP)
acrylic and ink on canvas with painted rib
Thousand Flowers, 2021 (MS)
various materials on canvas, 163 x 221 cm
Zodiac Room
Julian’s Dream, 2021 (MS)
various materials on fabric, 190 x 190 cm
Archive Fever (boxes for drawer lining paper), 2024
various card stocks, 18 boxes, each 45 x 6.5 x 6 cm
China Closet
Second Hand, 2019 (MS)
various materials on board, 93 x 61 cm
Empty Signifiers (grand tour), 2024 (AP)
pizza box cardboard, sugar paper, acrylic paint, metal stand, 64 x 34 x 20 cm
Upper Floor
Landing (hallway at top of stair)
Dead white men mentors falling down the stairs of art history, 2023 (AP)
acrylic and ink on canvas, tray framed, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
RGBSS, 2023(ribbon square) (AP)
acrylic and ink on canvas with painted ribbon, tray framed, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
State room (bedroom with pillars)
Happy as Larry he entered Lawrence without resistance, 2023 (AP)
acrylic and ink on canvas, tray framed, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
RGBTB, 2023 (ribbon suit) (AP)
acrylic and ink on canvas with painted ribbon, tray framed, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
I am the Goat (after Charlotte Devaney), 2024 (AP)
ink on ripstop fabric with screen printed ink attached from single baton, 200 x 143 cm
Quelle Etoile, 2020 (MS)
various materials on canvas, 224 x 150 cm
Pink Room
AI made me do it say it make it love it want it, 2023 (AP)
acrylic and ink on canvas, tray framed, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
Nowhere, 2021 (MS)
various materials on canvas, 150 x 161 cm
Closet in Pink Room
Putting pieces together, 2024 (MS & AP)
canvas, paint, paper on PVC, various empty toiletries, printed canvas, papier-mâché, painted pebbles, dimensions variable
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Notes for Tour Guides on works in the exhibition
(full title info in the brochure)
Basement
Reception (room on entry)
The cabinet contains illuminated ‘Joly screen’ photographs, a colour photo method invented in the 1880s that makes colour through an RGB stripe screen over a B&W film. Phelan has revived this process over the past few years and is showing a selection of ‘Dot’ themed photographs in display cases. These photographs are layered with coloured paper and dot patterns.
Images of fruit and fauna playfully relate to the kitchen basement albeit with a sheela-na-gig character disrupting the flow but maybe pointing to heroic women who once staffed this party house and the exotic fruits grown nearby on the estate.
Old Scullery (with cased model of former estate and dado rail)
Mark’s Special Offer, positioned in the fireplace, visually connects with Phelan’s dot photographs. It’s an obvious visual connection but Mark’s painting relates to consumerism, as the dots derive from sales stickers on supermarket groceries.
A notebook sits on a ledge nearby. Possibly a book in this room once contained scullery notes or was a housekeeping inventory. Pointing in this direction, Mark’s notebook cover is a different kind of list, more decorative than functional, it is based on a children’s word wall.
Corridor (in front of door to Butler’s Room/Office)
The satellite image may seem at odds with the analogue photograph and small display case and box but it is the contrast that is interesting. Just like the oranges in the kitchen next door. Netted oranges and overlapping circles make it optically confusing.
Main Old Kitchen (with copper pot display)
Zig Zag Girl is a new sculpture or 3D painting by Mark. Based on a magician’s prop but made from bedside lockers. It was conceived to disrupt expectations, much like the Casino itself. Covered in small drawings, paintings and patterns like stickers it implies stories but also overwhelms which encapsulate what Mark likes to do.
The Joly photos in these display cases on metal chests are a different way of presenting these works but suit the context as the vintage case and box match the historical surroundings somewhat. It makes the photos look like specimens or samples.
Panty (with sink)
Another Joly, this time a single dot with a rose in a fist with a wedding ring, a love photograph or political statement. The connection across these photographs is more than circles and context.
The board game on its plinth of bricks is not really one for playing. Instead, it is an artwork made by Mark directly inspired by the Casino. In a building designed solely for the purpose of entertainment it conveys a suggestion of play.
Pantry (room with fire extinguishers)
The painting fills the room with possible stories, exotic travels and strange, foreign cultures. Ted is in a wheelchair in front of his house. An Egyptian hieroglyphic figure possibly dances nearby. A chocolate Rice Krispie cake sits upon Ted’s shoulders where his head should be. There is a pink moon in the roof and a snake’s body coils on the ground between the figures. It’s a bizarre homage to the grand tour of the Earl which took him to Egypt on his 9 year trip away from Ireland.
Exterior basement gated tunnel
The marble hand without fingers is an enlargement of a wood modelling hand from Lidl but configured like the detached hand from the Winged Victory, the gem of the Louvre collection of classical statuary. Here it’s with the other failed fragments, and broken bits of copies, near the tunnels where Collins ricocheted bullets as recounted on tours.
To be placed in numerous locations
Elements from a Cosmic Garden are small painted rocks found throughout the Casino. Inspired by the Zodiac room on the ground floor in which you will find the 12 signs of the Zodiac in the ceiling dome, Mark wanted to make his own symbols which could be hidden inside the building. If the stones resemble something a child might do then you would be correct. Mark’s daughter collected and painted the stones with him.
Main Floor
Vestibule (at front door)
2 marble animals, a porcupine and a red river hog, flank the front door, mirroring the toy-like lions outside. These are unlikely guardians as they are all psychic, football score predicting animals. The were made by craft workers in China, similar to the skilled foreigners who made this building.
Blue Salon
Alan’s striped paintings in this room introduce us to several characters – Larry, Joseph and Tony. They never reveal themselves but point to stardom, futility, and deluded self-belief. They neither act as labels nor aids to the other works but add something elusive.
The ribbon tied to the painting over the mantlepiece is a decorative nod to the weddings that will be performed in this spot over the coming months. Empty lids stacked together with a ribbon offer a kind of gift, a depleted one, a nod to fancy luxury used up goods, exhausted like the building, blank yet meaningful.
The big red painting shows us Mark’s infatuation with decoration. It references a series of tapestries known as The Lady and the Unicorn. This artwork has 1000 elements, not just flowers, it’s exotic and domestic all at once. Collaged cartoon graphics and flowers cut from lots of sources create a garden for the room and Casino that it is missing. The beauty in the beast.
Having lines or stripes in common, List (by Mark) and Larry Larry (by Alan) flank both sides of the door from the Vestibule, they reveal nothing but obsession.
Zodiac Room
The painting that fills a wall in this hidden gentlemen’s room shows the collected dreams of Mark’s young son. The marquetry background connects it to the amazing floors below. Also, the panels in the painting reveal an illusive dreamscape of signs and symbols which add to those in the room itself from the signs of the Zodiac to the egg and dart mouldings on the door frame.
In parallel the coloured card boxes that fill the bookshelves hide secrets, stories and histories. They are boxes for rolled sugar paper standing in for possible manuscripts or maybe simply lining for drawers for furniture that has disappeared.
China Closet
Mark’s Irish dancing costume seemed a good physical and conceptual fit for this room. The painting has been assembled from other paintings resulting in repairs or scars throughout. This room shares similar histories and compositing in the plasterwork which was repaired after a fire with carvings from different time periods.
The signpost on the table is the 3D version of what is under Phelan’s word paintings – the configuration of words on signposts. Based on French road signs but made from pizza boxes. This is a sign of some good times but gone elsewhere now.
Upper Floor
Landing (hallway at top of stair)
More striped paintings by Phelan but now with painted ribbon, concealing clothes underneath, and all the men falling down stairs when history is lost.
State room (bedroom with pillars)
The bedroom is for dressing and undressing, play-acting and fantasy. Again Phelan introduces named characters into the party. The flamboyant stripe figure with Larry and Lawrence.
The large hanging screen print has lyrics from a dance track by Charlotte Devaney. It’s a nod to bedroom antics and the architect Chambers who put goat motifs throughout the building.
Mark’s large painting asks What Stars? in French. It has a myriad of recognisable forms – black statues, chandeliers, stars, a clock, graffiti – framed by a pattern of black and white decorative squares. The pattern and decoration movement from the 1970s connect to the 1770s. A lavish explosion of references.
Pink Room
This room contained maps and it was a good starting point for Mark and his painting titled Nowhere. The building plans and former site and estate plans inspired the assemblage in the closet also. It’s a combination of pieces by both artists.
The text painting is a declaimer of sorts, one to push the exhibition back into this century by remembering that we are on the edge of giving away our intentions to machines instead of believing in ourselves. Some of the press material was generated by AI, re-writing boring statements into happy blank verse.
Pink Room Closet
This small toilet or wardrobe is a mess. Here bits and pieces from both artists are scattered on the floor. It’s either a dumping ground for ideas or just a dump in a messy closet. On closer inspection there are lots of references to the building – the walled garden, the egg and arrow, stains, poos, puddles, spills, luxury goods, used and reused.
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Alan Phelan and Mark Swords: The List and the Line review – A riveting dialogue between past and contemporary aesthetic attitudes
The artists’ work, with its overt sensuousness and colourful bombast, is perfect for show at Casino Marino
Tom Lordan
Mon May 6 2024 – 05:00
Alan Phelan and Mark Swords: The List and the Line
Casino Marino, Dublin
★★★★★
If you haven’t visited Casino Marino, in north Dublin, there has perhaps never been a better time than now. This 18th-century national monument, which contains 16 impeccable rooms across three floors, is the fruit of the architectural and aesthetic education of James Caulfeild, 4th Viscount Charlemont, who as a young man travelled for many years, immersing himself in the cultures of Europe, Turkey and north Africa.
Amid the splendour of a building described as “perhaps our finest neoclassical jewel”, the work of artists Alan Phelan and Mark Swords sets in motion a riveting dialogue between past and contemporary aesthetic attitudes.
Phelan and Swords are perfect collaborators for an endeavour such as this: their practices are sharply distinct, but the styles of their artworks are, on a formal level, complementary, and they clearly share a penchant for playful interrogations of institutional space. In his last solo exhibition, for instance, Swords hacked the architectural infrastructure of the RHA by constructing a small enclosure at the centre of the room, like an extemporised artist sanctuary, which forced his expansive paintings to cluster together in anxious proximity.
In this setting, however, there is an abundance of space, and the pair take great advantage of the Casino’s layout, including a magnificent state room, the Zodiac room, and basement kitchens, as well as of architectural features such as its hidden recesses and parquet flooring. Phelan deserves credit for his imaginative opening salvo along the lower floors: at the entrance, his sculpture The Other Hand of Victory subversively nestles among some forlorn stonework; when you step inside, his Joly screen photographs proliferate throughout, the antique technology producing primary colours that contrast vividly with the cool, dimly lit interior, all of which serves to firmly set the tone, a performative dynamic that stages the interplay between old and new, past and present.
Fittingly, Swords and Phelan’s work is characterised by an overt sensuousness and colourful bombast, perfect for an exhibition within a historical pleasure demesne. Unlike a white-cube gallery, the Casino is, in the words of the critic James Merrigan, “a novel opportunity” to encounter work “not refrigerated from the outside world”. The state room in particular provides a sumptuous experience: the luxury of the environs, including gold-filigreed Ionic columns, amplifies the large-scale works Quelle Etoile, by Swords, and I Am the Goat (After Charlotte Devaney), by Phelan.
Phelan’s preoccupation with the red-green-blue colour model is writ large here, imbuing the oblique language and half-formed sentences splashed across the canvas with a visual heat. Swords’s offering is a painterly tapestry, where childlike abstractions mutate into butterflies and ambiguous plantlife, and black starfish swim gracefully within the borders of a rainbow mosaic that frames the centrepiece. The artworks pulse with an electric current, lighting up the room, giving its flavour of old licentiousness a thrilling nuance.
The List and the Line continues at Casino Marino, Dublin 3, until Monday, July 29th
Captions on images:
Swords and Phelan’s work is characterised by an overt sensuousness and colourful bombast, perfect for an exhibition within a historical pleasure demesne. Photograph: Louis Haugh
Phelan’s preoccupation with the red-green-blue colour model is writ large here, imbuing the oblique language and half-formed sentences splashed across the canvas with a visual heat. Photograph: Louis Haugh
The Casino is, in the words of the critic James Merrigan, ‘a novel opportunity’ to encounter work ‘not refrigerated from the outside world’. Photograph: Louis Haugh