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PAINTINGS
ANNE MADDEN: LATEST PAINTINGS
For the last couple of years, Anne Madden has been making paintings about the Northern Lights, which seems to be an appropriately northern subject, now that she has returned to Ireland after spending many years in the South of France. These paintings are ambitious in scale, spectacular in their depiction of chromatic contrasts and highly accomplished in their technique, but they are also Romantic in their conception and resonant with symbolic potential. During one of my several visits to her studio to see how they were developing, Madden described them as paintings about different layers of light, implying that they were merely an analysis of physical phenomena; they are much more than this, however. Madden paints deep and ambiguous spaces – a constant feature in her work, as we shall later see – which invite us nonetheless to explore metaphysical ideas when looking at them.
Certainly, this group of paintings remind me of ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ (1947), possibly one of the most accomplished poems by Wallace Stevens. He wrote this long Romantic poem about crisis and death in his late 60s. The sky, for both Madden and Stevens, becomes a sort of terrible mirror in which a descending night is ripe with unsettling revelations. And consequently by noting this, both eloquently explore the realm of the sublime. I shall come back to this, but beforehand, I would like to go back in time to the beginnings of Madden’s career and to briefly describe some of her early works, in order to define her artistic practice.
Aurora B, 2004, oil on canvas, polyptych, 195 x 570 cmAnne Madden has now been painting for over half a century, and even if it is clear that she is enjoying an especially strong creative outburst at the moment, the final outcome of which is still unknown, it is possible to make a clear assessment of her work to date ... The pronounced intensity of the colours in these last works is reminiscent of some of the paintings of Henri Matisse, who painted interiors as the memory of sensual experiences. The paintings of Anne Madden have, though, very strong material qualities. After she has applied the paint with the brush, she dries it with pieces of cloth, which alters something that probably appeared to be more liquid originally. If one looks at the surface of the paintings close-up, one can appreciate some kind of mineral effect: there are clear traces of dry pigment. From a distance, the effect is different, suggesting the power of changing nocturnal lights and its subjective potential. The mood becomes characteristically elegiac. Watching the auroras, Madden re-enacts the Romantic confrontation between the artist’s mind and the world, where death reigns. The effect of the auroras has been described by some as a kind of snake of light. This beautiful snake stands, however, for constant flux and, ultimately, death. Madden resolves the paintings as problems of composition, pictorial process, texture, colour and light, but remains constantly aware of what can be achieved through this beyond mere abstraction. Her approach to painting could be described as material, as opposed to formal, but Madden is fully committed to (and wholly engaged with) the transformative powers of her medium.
Enriqué Juncosa, Director, Irish museum of Modern Art
Exhibition catalogue Anne Madden. A Retrospective, IMMA, 27 June 2007 - 30 September
Winged Figure, 2004
Aurora borealis, Snake of Light, 2006
Aurora borealis, Chèvres Dansantes, 2006
