DAVID EAGER MAHER
TEXTS (SELECTION)
Distant Fires
by John Hutchinson
on the works of the solo exhibition Children & Flowers
Jarmuschek + Partner | October 14–November 25, 2023
Among the more radical features of the 1960s counterculture were an emphasis on positivity, experimentalism, opposition to consumerism, and the rejection of conventional hierarchical structures. In the popular arts there was an interest in informality, imagination, and the visionary, often brought together in forms that combined words and images - exemplified, for instance, in music posters and album sleeves, as well as in widespread admiration for the work of artists such as William Blake. Overlooked at the time, but perceptible in retrospect, was a current of Romantic conservatism, perhaps a response to the anxiety and fear in society that have since become endemic, and the movement’s progressivist idealism was soon to fade and crumble, other values, superficially similar, taking its place. Not long afterwards the development of punk subculture, which was negative, angry and anarchic, did much to undermine what remained of the ethos of the liberal 1960s, although its anti-establishment attitudes and endorsement of individual freedom and libertarian ethics were closer to the nonconformist spirit of its predecessor than might at first appear.
In the void created by the foundering of countercultural idealism and, more generally, of the progressive aspirations of liberal modernism, less benign values and structures have continued to emerge. In Europe, authoritarian nationalism is growing; in the Middle East, militant Islam endangers peace, stability, and freedom. The United States has been troubled by an electoral crisis, caused by the rise of populism and the polarisation of Left and Right; Brexit has compromised the integrity of the EU. After the fall of the Soviet Union, liberal capitalism seemed to be consolidating its position as the dominant global ideology, but the West has become fraught with social fragmentation, a growing consciousness of environmental dangers, and racial problems. The furtive expansion of the corporate state, driven by the rapid development of cyber-technology, continues to pose unsettling threats to freedom and privacy, and the recent pandemic caused extraordinary restrictions on social freedom, urgent legislation subverting much of the independence that we usually take for granted.
It is against this background of unease and disturbance that contemporary art is shaped and defined, and David Eager Maher’s complex paintings reflect the collapse of cultural certainties and conventional social narratives. Nevertheless, there is tenuous but stubborn coherence in his visual stories and theatrical mise-en-scènes; their disparate elements are held together by imagination and a faint sense of hope, connections that may be obscure to the viewer but are surely felt by the artist. They are positioned somewhere between the past and the future. Several of his most recent pieces, small in scale and with fragmentary texts rendered in rough handwriting below the images, bear traces of cultural nostalgia. ‘Demo’ (2023), for example, depicts a group of long-haired musicians, reminiscent of hippies, sitting in a circle in the open air, but its accompanying commentary sharply punctures the initial impression of relaxed friendship; ‘Stretch’ (2022) attaches an ironic apocalyptic text to a vivid psychedelic landscape. These allusions might be read as approving references to the 1960s counterculture, but their undertones are doubting and sceptical.
There is something ‘hauntological’ about Maher’s images. Inspired by Jacques Derrida, the writer Mark Fisher described ‘hauntology’ as a kind of nostalgia for failed dreams, a yearning for what he called ‘lost futures’, which are possibilities and aspirations embraced by the modernist project but never realised, nullified by neoliberalism’s empty promises. It is sometimes suggested that progressive modernism has disappeared, and that contemporary culture has all but abandoned enlightening goals, but ‘hauntology’ shows that the past can sometimes return to trouble or encourage us. The counterculture of the 1960s created a temporary hiatus between the increasingly bland ambitions of mainstream modernism and the shallow emptiness of much that came afterwards; despite elements of self-delusion, its awkward utopianism was hopeful and inspiring. In that light, a new form of cultural resistance might be welcome, to be identified, in society at large, by positive actions and attitudes that help to transform today’s fears, threats, platitudes, and anomie, and in art by the making of images and objects that are truthful and beautiful. Such changes, if they are to be meaningful, would not be effortless, but they may no longer be optional. Their urgency is signalled in another of David Eager Maher’s new images: as the text on ‘Distant Fires’ (2023) cryptically declares, ‘Here everything is frozen. In the distance all is burning’.
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Dream Head
on the solo exhibition at Jarmuschek + Partner | November 3– December 15, 2018
David Eager Maher's works are complex encounters in form and content.
His collages of found papers, further developed with painting and drawing, open up entire worlds to the beholder, which spatially intertwine, overlap in time and merge thematically in a surreal manner.
The artist finds his motifs on the one hand in nature and on the other in man-made, cultural and historical objects. Although these objects may usually be clearly assigned to one sphere or the other, the interdependence and intertwining - the inspiration of the man-made world by nature and the design and penetration of nature by the human hand – becomes evident for the viewer again and again. Osciliating between harmony and melancholy, David Eager Maher's pictures appear, like in Robert Frost's poem „Tree at my window“, as diffuse, dreamlike sequences full of loneliness and oblivion. A sometimes foggy, mysterious atmosphere surrounds his works.
In their fine, playful and almost intimate details, they may remind us of 19th century works of art - and yet they are highly contemporary with their perspective breaks and their degree of abstraction. Powerful, partly pasty, depth-generating colour surfaces bring these collaged worlds to life and, with their opulence, maximally contrast with the fine pencil lines that seem like a transition to the delicate materiality of the paper.
Freshly created and reused patterns again play an important role in David Eager Maher's current series of works. They are able to point the viewer to a mysterious, further, pictorially immanent level by giving the new work a patina and, in part, its own, already lived history. They appear like framings and curtains that suggest a glimpse into another time or another place.
Abstraction and figuration, fragility and rush, paper and color, motif and background, shadow and light, the formed and the grown - everything seems to be less in competition than in a dance, interacts with one another as if on a water surface, where sometimes some elements and sometimes others appear, only to step back instantly and let the next take the lead.
Harmony. Idyll. Man. Nature.
A fragile balance.
(text: Ines Wittneben)
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THE STRANGE, UNSETTLING WORLD OF DAVID EAGER MAHER
by Aidan Dunne | published in: The Irish Times (Dec 19th, 2017)
At the conclusion of John Fuller’s novella Flying to Nowhere, set in a remote island monastery, there is a startling image: the wood, which has been felled, seasoned, cut and carpentered to provide the essence of a comfortable interior, a haven for prayer, contemplation and scholarship, comes back to life, swelling and sprouting, rebelling against the straight lines imposed on it, breaking through the boundary between culture and nature, tearing asunder the dream of an orderly world view, with God in his heaven.
Fuller’s image comes to mind in relation to David Eager Maher’s fine exhibition, Locus at the Oliver Sears Gallery, consisting of just eight modestly scaled paintings. In the paintings it is as if the orderly, often classical interiors are invaded by vegetation, usually trees, sometimes unruly copses, sometimes individual plants. It is only as if, though, because the status of the spaces we see is in fact ambiguous, either or both inside and out depending on how you choose to interpret them.
When Eager Maher completed his MFA at NCAD in 2011, the essential elements his work as it is now were in place, but in a less resolved, less cogent form. Drawing, still essential, was much more dominant. His own facility, and the ease of drawing as a process tended to lead to greater, perhaps fussy elaboration. Classical, rather grand interiors, apparently based on art-historical models rather than architectural-historical models, were even then in evidence, as was the eruption of nature into these havens of civilised order.
One major development is that Eager Maher is now much more a painter than he was. Not that he couldn’t use paint – he certainly could – but now he is at ease with the medium, and able to use its characteristics in shaping his work rather than merely fleshing out an image. Witness especially Annexe, Spool and Thicket, all of which use the quality of brush strokes, the translucency of glazes, and selective colour to great effect. Add Fruit Tree, in which a resplendent interior is littered with felled trees, and you have the four best works in a consistently impressive show, a terrific quartet.
Retrospective quality
From the beginning a retrospective quality in Eager Maher’s work has attracted comment. Somewhere along the way the description “a 19th-century explorer living in 21st-century Wicklow” became attached to him. Whether it was his or someone else’s phrase is not clear, but it’s accurate enough, though not in the empire-building sense of the term. Does the work express a nostalgia for an earlier era? Not quite, no. Tie it to history and there is a built-in critique of imperialism, with exotic jungles reclaiming the outposts of European colonialism.
More than a critique is embodied in the paintings. There were many kinds of explorers active at the time. The Victorian era, especially the latter half of the 19th century into the Edwardian early 20th century, saw seismic shifts in almost every area: science, politics, religion and the arts. As old ideas became unmoored, everything was up for grabs. Ruskin bemoaned the geologists tapping away at the biblical account of earth’s history; Darwin recast humans as a product of evolution; Einstein confounded our understanding of time and space; Marx had planted the seeds of political and economic upheaval; mystical and occult ideas flourished. Despite the recreational trappings evident in some of Eager Maher's paintings (a deckchair, a beach umbrella), they suggest not serenity and ease but a state of flux. The world won't stay still. Presumed meanings evaporate, certainties collapse. Civilisations apparent achievements are tentative and evanescent. Orderly pattern is symbolically shredded in Awning, as tropical vegetation bursts through the geometry of the tiled floor and the fabric shade.
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"David Eager Maher's works institute and inhabit an ambiguous, meditative space that looks back
but is equally open to premodernity and the hyperreality of postmodernity."
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times | 2016
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PAPER TREES
An Essay by Ingrid Lyons | 2016
It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
There are certain exotic trees; oriental ferns, castor plants and windmill palms that manage to flourish in harsh weather conditions and waterlogged soils. They appear strange and unfamiliar against the hardy perennials and steadfast natives. Large glossy leaves give a sense of opulence and decadence as lush fronds unfurl dramatically from furry brown stalks. David Eager Maher has often pictured these botanical specimens in his intricate arrangements-their leaves creating screens or casting shadows as they spring forth from dense indigenous foliage or sprawl in the corner of a plush interior.
In this recent body of work, Eager Maher has increasingly connected interior and landscape. Within these unpeopled scenes, architectural features merge with forests and imaginary plains collide with what appear to be backdrops of classical paintings. They are strange vistas that seem part autobiographical, part art historical. Leaves of paper are carefully placed, cultivating a faint variation of surface textures. Some areas are further embellished with motifs ranging from that of the orient to the family home; bright, bold, w axy red flowers in Settle are a throwback to the 1970s Irish kitchen – a pattern often accompanied with red Formica table tops.
Transparent layers allow traces of underlying marks to peep through and some details have been lightly sanded away . Eager Maher’s use of paper evidences a level of concentration, a delicate patience and understanding of its surface quality, how it can be imprinted or incised, how it responds to watercolour and how it becomes bleached, faded and otherwise altered over time. He acknowledges the delicate and ephemeral qualities of paper, celebrating its diversity as a medium.
The deceptively simple layering of paper belies the feeling of the work; which is intermittently meticulous and spontaneous. Compositions are refrained and controlled though there are hints at humour as visual ploys and illusions add an element of play. Some areas have received more attention and they contain more detail yet other areas have been left bare where the picture plain is interrupted only by preliminary pencil marks. There seems to be an underlying antagonism between that which is ornate and that which is plain.
Perspective in the landscape and architecture also appears disrupted as scenes overlap as in a dream sequence. Within David Eager Maher’s compositions, boundaries between lived interiors and fantastical exotica are in constant flux. They exemplify a merging of worlds - natural and domestic, dream and reality, ostentation and reticence. Within them
there is a conflation of living, collecting, and art making. In many ways Eager Maher’s compositions describe dreams and follies, mediated through colours and contours in the surroundings.
The Pink Studio, (1911), a painting by Henri Matisse’s of his own studio, pictures an array of artworks at various stages of completion. A screen draped with fabric obfuscates the view from the window, furniture and decorative rugs adorn the floors. It is the conflation of myriad motifs and patterns that form the surface of the painting. Portraits, nudes, and still lives share the canvas with furnishings and ornaments. This approach suggests that Matisse saw no division between art, nature and the interior of his studio-as though he regarded all as an experience of sensuality. Thus he surrounded himself with objects that appealed to him and made paintings that were an extension of his personal predilections.
In a similar way David Eager Maher paints and draws after his own archive of fragmentary predilections. In his compositions there is evidence of a narrative but crucial details have been removed or hidden; fabrics, screens and foliage prevent a full reading and indeed memories of drawings and etchings from another time are hidden beneath and behind preceding layers. These collages constitute a miscellany of paper memories, gathered from domestic encounters or pursued through German antique paper purveyors. Within each composition the rare and the exotic co-exist alongside the familiar and the common, altogether emphasising the experience of assimilation or displacement.