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THE IRISH TIMES

The Arts Wednesday July 5th 2006

A Travel log in vivid pictures

Visual Arts
Aidan Dunne

Reviewed
Cuba: A Naive Portrait, CHQ until July 8 (086-8093597)

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Apparently Waterford-based artist Pat Murphy had long been fascinated by Cuba before he set off on a three-month walking tour of the country. He was accompanied by Bonnie Dempsey, a young filmmaker who chronicled his travels and is working on a documentary account of them entitled Cuban Portrait: Travel with the artist Pat Murphy. In the meantime, you can see much of the work Murphy made in Cuba, and you can see him making some of it, in Cuba: A Naive Portrait at CHQ, close to the FSC in Docklands, a show organised by Waterford's enterprising Dyehouse Gallery. As part of the show, which has proven to be extremely popular, extracts from Dempsey's footage is being screened on four monitors.

Murphy, who lives in the Ring Gaeltacht and is a gifted draughtsman in the mould of Charles Cullen, cuts a striking figure as Our Man in Havana. Wraith-thin, he shelters behind flowing locks, a prolific beard and specs.

At work on the street in Cuba, he converses with curious passers-by, remarking, rightly enough in this case, that language is a barrier to communication and that images are better. Certainly the incidental audiences he attracts as he works his way at a leisurely pace through the towns and countryside seem warmly responsive to what he is doing.

What he is doing, ambitiously, is to create a variant of a Chinese scroll painting, a pictorial narrative based on his travels. Given that the component parts of this epic work on paper are metres long, it was an optomistic undertaking. On screen, you can see him battling successfully on site with this difficult format.

Previously his characteristic style could be described as brooding and introspective, quite low key and dark. Like Cullen, he was influenced by the virtuoso German graphic artist Horst Jensen.

Cuba prompted some significant adjustments, introducing light and colour in a big way. But he doesn't give up his penchant for pushing expressive distortion to extremes. The fact that he is making a picaresque narrative based on a road trip (and the eventual movie will be a road movie in essence) brings to ming Gerald Scarfe's illustrations for Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing. A comparison is apt, except that Murphy is freer in the graphic liberties he takes and, in place of the loathing, there is an unmistakable liking for the spirit and joie de vivre of the Cubands which, incidentally, comes across strongly in the film footage.

He works fast, with great verve, sometimes opting for collaged photographs in lieu of illustrative description. Separately from the scroll format, he made a series of portraits of individuals. They are audaciously concise, but really vivid and effective. Behind the idea of graphic work and film is the strong possibility that both convey a picture of Cuba just prior to a moment of major change. Murphy and Dempsey have provided us with vibrant, vivid accounts of the way things are.

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