The inspirational genius of Turner

‘Good morning, Mr Turner: Niall Naessens and J. M. W. Turner’

Exhibition in Print Gallery, National Gallery of Ireland, free admission to January 31, 2018

Every January the NGI mounts an exhibition of its collection of Turner water colours. For conservation reasons these can only be exhibited in the  season of low winter light. The rare chance to see these gems of water colour brings many people back to the gallery every year, as a sort of pilgrimage. The genius of  Turner needs little introduction, but a couple of  items  have been added this year from other bequests to refresh the show.

In addition, mounted alongside the Turners, is a show by Irish print maker Niall Naessens, which is also well worth seeing, not just for its reimaging of some of  Turner’s images, but for the unique talent of the artist himself in a different art genre.

Water colour demands speed and confidence. Prints such as those Naessens makes, need care and patience; the results are not so much counterparts, as polar opposites. The interplay between the two imaginations is most interesting.

In the prints there are echoes to Hiroshige, and humorous allusion to other forms such as amateur films. But Naessens is not creating parodies or pastiches. He is very much his own man. Several of the prints echo the Turners directly such as one of the Grand Canal in Venice. But some are striking in their own right. There are allusions to Blake, to Burke on the Sublime, and to the new theories of light in the late 19th Century which excited both scientists and artists at the time.

One is struck by Naessens’ relationship with the Kerry landscape in which he works. One especially effective image is that of two figures contemplating a scene; it reminds one of early images of the Grand Canyon, or William Dyce’s great painting of Pegwell Bay. The contemplation of geology, time, and the transitory nature of man suffuses them all.