Gary Coyle | Terra Cognita

13th February – 15th March 2025

“A drawing is the testing of ideas. A slow motion version of thought, it does not arrive instantly like a photo . The uncertain & imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning , what ends in clarity does not beginning that way” – William Kentridge

Terra Cognita, Gary Coyle’s first exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh since 2020’s Dreaming Different Dreams, finds us on familiar ground, in which the artist employs the same methodology and revisits many of the themes and motifs that he has explored over the years.

Once again the gallery walls are covered with a large scale immersive wall drawing made on a digital drawing tablet. This time it’s of a wet dank monocultural Sitka Spruce Forest. It is based on a tiny screen grab culled from the Internet; its hallucinatory colours derived from a room in the The Wallace collection – the artists favorite museum. It has been skillfully remixed and reimagined by designer Oonagh Young, and provides a setting for and foil to the unframed, intensively worked charcoal drawings that are pinned on top and in which Coyle picks up where he last left off.

The barn owl in Ghost is a successor to the artist’s previous drawings of Cats and dogs, part super cute meme and part harbinger of menace & death, (via owl Painter extraordinaire Hieronyus Bosch) Too wit too wooo. The owl stands in the immediate foreground of a Claudian style Landscape, with beautiful trees and a heavy sky, in the distance standing on an outcrop, is that staple of The Gothic,  the Haunted house, which based on the watch tower at Dalkey Quarry which has stood  guard, looking down over all of Dun Laoghaire since the early 1800’s and where a friend of his of his tragically died  many years ago.

This is a template for how he has long made drawings, picking from here and there, mashing up high and low, the new and old, splicing fashion magazine shoots, with Titian Landscapes, Internet memes with 18th century Swagger Portraits or Screen Grabs from video games and seeing what happens. Very often nothing does and the drawing gets discarded. Or sometimes he feeds these sources through his Campagna, his Terra Cognita, Dun Laoghaire, which he has repeatedly investigated throughout his career, via writing, photography, spoken word performance and drawing.

A theme that Coyle has explored again and again is The Forest,  which has long been a staple of folklore, stretching  all the way back to The Epic Of Gilmesh. It  has always functioned as a liminal space where strange things can and do  happen.  The Artist has only framed one drawing for this exhibition, and it is a charcoal copy of the wallpaper, which hangs on a different vividly coloured wallpaper,   and which explores another stalwart of Gothic , the Double, the of the divided self, though which is the Doppleganger, and who haunts who?

Another motif that Coyle has often used is that of The Eye ,  “In a Forest Clearing”  we see a vast Brodgian All Seeing Eye, (a tip of the hat to Guston), which is peering into the deepest recesses of  the forest, which is based on a screen grab from a video game, Fee fi fo Fum.

So far so highfalutin, there are also easier pleasures to be found, whether its in the bewildered face of a Instagram antropromorphic Poodle, Still Crazy After All These Years or velvety charcoal waves of the sea  in “The Flood”, the result of umpteen erasions, or  the rendering of the silk top hat in “Magus” which  is a self portrait of the Artist, a successor to 2015’s After Watteau, (a mash up of  Watteau’s Commedia  dell Arte Clown  Gilles & John  Wayne Gancy). This time its Alice Cooper meets Slash, a send up, a piss take of his “Dark” Obcessions “whoooooo” as well as an example of  Maskenfreiheit, another one of those  great german portmanteau words, meaning“ The freedom conferred by wearing a mask”,  a portrait of the artist,  flailing, trying to make sense of and plot his way through  the world and failing, a world changing  at warp speed, a world groaning under a surfeit of imagery, of Memes, of endless Glossy Ad’s and Instagram feeds, images of unspeakable cruelty,  and of course art, all  ever  present, all just a  mere screen  stroke away .

“What Kind of Man am I, sitting at home, watching TV & reading magazines ,going into a frustrated fury about everything, & then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.” – Philip Guston