Maurice Desmond Exhibition Introduction

Looking into the Abyss

"If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss starts to stare into you." NIETZSCHE

Many years ago I remember sitting in Henchey's pub in St. Luke's and hearing Professor Sean Lucy describe Maurice Desmond as "the last of the Munster romantics". At the time I thought how apt that was. Maurice was every inch the romantic artist it seemed to me. There was his rigorous adherence to the romantic image of the artist. This manifested itself in many ways. His dress code was almost uniform-like in its insistence on dark blues and blacks. The ensemble capped by the long luxuriant hair, solidly based on the substantial black boots, and often accompanied by the swagger of a black leather coat. And of course there was also the uncompromisingly bohemian lifestyle. Inviting Maurice along to your bourgeois soirees was fraught with risk. He saw no reason to behave in a predictable manner and was quite likely to insult the host or abuse the carpet - usually on sound aesthetic grounds.

Maurice's work also lent itself to a romantic interpretation. Many saw him as part of the brooding bogscape school of contemporary Irish art. Members of this school produce a range of moody expressionist landscapes, seascapes, and bogscapes. Romantic Ireland alive and brooding. The names Sean McSweeney and Mary Lohan spring to mind. Whatever about these connections, I looked elsewhere for comparisons when I initially encountered Maurice's work. The artist he most called to mind for me was the Romantic poet Wordsworth. Like Wordsworth, Maurice's work evoked a Pantheistic universe. Nature was alive, beautiful, and vaguely threatening. It loomed. The young Wordsworth felt nature like a real presence. And you sensed this also in Maurice's work.

Maurice's early work also had its lighter moments. There were nudes from his time on Sherkin Island and waterfalls from his sojourn in Monard Glen - subject matter rooted in the specific. These were minor diversions however; he had a course to steer that took him well away from such fripperies.

Over the years the palette has darkened and the subject matter has been refined to minute variations on a single theme. There is now a hard classical feel to his work. Rather than evoking Romantic poetry, you now get a sense of Greek tragedy. The Greeks knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. They also recognised the power of art to make life bearable. The works are also classical in their rigour, discipline, and restraint. This shows itself in the methodical reworking and attention to detail, where every brushstroke or flick of the palette knife makes a world of difference.

There is an image in Anglo-Saxon literature that encapsulates what Maurice Desmond's art is now about. A bird emerges from the primeval darkness and flies through the lighted mead hall where all is merriment and music. In a flash the bird is outside again in the perennial darkness. Such is the life of man. A spark of light in the void.

You know from the title of this show, "Odes, Elegies, and Adagios", that you are not in for an easy ride. If you stare into these paintings long enough, they begin to stare into you. His landscapes bear no relationship to geographical locations. They exist as vehicles to carry this sense of the tragic. He has fought most of his life with the notion that art is not possible after Auschwitz. In 1949, Theodor Adorno, a leading German critic whose faith in humanity had been irrevocably shaken by the Holocaust, made the following declaration: "After Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry". Adorno later acknowledged that "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream". Maurice's work takes its cue from this. He sends us missives from the void.

The paintings have a brooding presence that will discourage those who are looking for decoration rather than an encounter. The term "encounter" is important. Maurice's work rewards those who take the trouble to look at them with openness - an I-thou encounter rather than an I-it, to use Buber's formulation. They have the kind of presence that you also feel in the later work of Mark Rothko. They remind us again that the saddest songs can be the sweetest.