I know nothing about art. I don t even know what I like. But I have the good sense to reach for my gun whenever I see a young artist with a goatee, especially if it s a woman. The Dublin art scene is teeming with such morosely earnest individuals. Their talent remains untried but only because their cases haven t come for hearing up yet.
As he is in so many other areas of life, Tom Mathews is an exception in the world of painters. Whenever the ace cartoonist turns his hand, and his imagination, to a broader canvas, the result is invariably an intoxicating treat for both the eye and the funny bone. His latest triumph is an exhibition entitled Post Pop, which is currently running at the Tosca restaurant on Dublin s Suffolk Street.
Part homage, part hootfest, Post Pop features 12 cracking visual jokes, larded with high art references and lowborn cartoon characters, all beautifully executed with vivid clarity and style. This is a universe where Bugs Bunny rubs shoulders (or whatever it is that bunnies rest their floppy ears on) with Edvard Munch, and where Francis Bacon gets fried yolks all over his face just so he can appear in a painting entitled Bacon And Eggs.
Elsewhere, Dagwood and friends turn up in a (per)version of Manet s Le Dijeuner Sur L Herbe. That basically means The Lunch On The Grass, Tom explains. But, in my take on it, we have Dagwood and Blondie eating the picnic with their neighbour, Herb Woodley who s saying, This is all on me, Dagwood . It s a rather vile pun but I enjoy it.
The Expressionist painter, Otto Dix, also makes his presence felt in Post Pop. In the Beetle Bailey comic strip, Sergeant Snorkel s dog is called Otto, affirms Tom. So, I have surrounded Otto with dicks, in an Andy Warhol fashion. There are eight of these virile members displayed in eight panels. Otto is also Italian for 8, so I m proud to say it s a multilingual gag.
FINE PRODUCTS
My personal favourite piece in the exhibition involves two of the most totemic figures in Irish cultural life, Barney and Beany. Marcel Duchamp, that old master of the avant garde, who died in his 80s sometime back, produced a thing called The Bride Stripped Bare By The Bachelors Even, says Tom. It s a large and complicated thing involving paintings of coffee mills and sheets of glass gathering dust and so on. I ve always been intrigued by the title. So, since I was using a lot of cartoon characters, I thought, who better than Barney and Beany of Batchelors fame? They ve long been an influence on my work. I cannot disparage their fine products.
Mathews has been working on these paintings for two years, but some of the ideas behind them have been germinating since his days in art college over two decades ago. Most of my work is so transient, he asserts. Most of it is commissioned maybe two days before it appears in the paper. Some of these pictures started out as cartoons but I realised that they had more potential. It s nice that all those years that I spent in art college learning how to draw and paint have been telescoped into doing cartoons. But, at the same time, I felt the need for something to fill in the long evenings, apart from decorating the public houses of the town.
The pieces retail for between #400 and #550, and several have already been sold. Post Pop will continue to run at Tosca for another four weeks. The best viewing times are from 11am to 12.30pm, and from 2.30pm to 4pm. All are welcome, even people with goatees.
The art world are not renowned for their sense of humour though they ve given me several laughs over the years, chortles Tom Mathews. I m not a great believer in drawing lines between high art and popular art. There are areas of high art that appeal to me immensely, but I feel that comic art is a very real art as well. There s plenty of humour in Ulysses, there s plenty of humour in the Wake, and Shakespeare spent as much time writing comedies as he did writing tragedies. Comedy is an essential ingredient in the old human condition, and a much denigrated one.
When Woody Allen started making his serious movies, he said he wanted to go and sit at the grown-ups table for a while. I like to think I m already at the grown-ups table. I m just eating the kiddies lunch. n