Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 9th December 2020

44 37 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Triptych - States of Being II Oil on canvas, 41 x 81cm (16¼ x 31¾’’) Signed and dated (19)’64 verso Caoimhin MacGiolla Leith has written of LeBrocquy’s Human Image Paintings:- There are very few artists who have maintained as steadfast a commitment as Louis le Brocquy has over the past half a century to envisioning what it is to be an embodied human being adrift in an alienating world the true reality of which is likely to lie forever beyond our comprehension. This ongoing concern - implicit, as we shall see, but still dormant in his paintings of the 1940s and early 1950s - first came literally to light in the year 1955 with all the force of a powerful revelation, as the artist himself has recounted on several occasions. One day in La Mancha, while touring Spain on a textile-designing commission from a London magazine, le Brocquy was forcibly struck by the image of a number of figures standing in brilliant sunshine against a white-washed wall. As he recalls: From that moment I never perceived the human presence in quite the same way. I had witnessed light as a kind of matrix from which the human being emerges and into which it ambivalently recedes - with which it even identifies. This ambiguous double movement of emergence and recession, of presencing and absencing, has characterised his work ever since. This is especially pronounced in the numerous early paintings of the isolated and anonymous human figure that le Broc- quy painted in the late 50s and early 60s. Transfixed in the glare of a brilliant, unworldly light, a centrally located, largely inchoate human torso seems to struggle over and over again in these paintings to achieve or maintain a worldly fleshiness that would allow its spirit to body forth, and thereby allow us, the viewers, to register fully its mundane and troubled particularity ... It is, however, at least arguable that le Brocquy’s relentless and repeated exploration of the nexus between consciousness and corporeality is at its most potent, not in the cele- brated heads, but in that body of work, initiated shortly after the afore-mentioned Pauline revelation of 1955, which the artist now refers to collectively as ‘Paintings of the Human Image’, and in particular in the series of torsos from the late 50s and early ‘60s known as the ‘Presences’. For it is in these works that le Brocquy, undistracted as yet by the exigencies of capturing a likeness, allows himself to focus most resolutely on the depiction of some common core of physical embodiment, some essential aspect of human presence (or indeed self-presence) which transcends the myriad distinctions of age, race, gen- der, class, and so forth which combine to constitute the individual in society. In this le Brocquy is by no means at variance with those major artists of the immediate post-war period, such as Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon, with whom he shared, amongst other things, a fidelity to figuration at a time when the hegemony of abstraction seemed well-nigh absolute. In an interview in 2002 MacGiolla Leith discusses States of Being with the artist:- CMGL: ‘’In the triptych States of Being (2000) you also revisit a much earlier composition States of Being , (1964) in which a centrally placed male torso facing us on a light ground is flanked by two further torsos on much darker grounds , which face toward the centre panel, and which we view from the side. While the technical ren- dition of the individual figures in both triptychs is consistent with other contemporaneous paintings, the dynamic of a triptych necessarily affects our perception of these otherwise typically isolated figures.’’ LleB: ‘’ My own perception in painting those States of Being was not exactly to paint a relationship or dynamic between three separate figures. It was rather to contrast various states of being within a single being. That they are seen to be quite different shapes and tones might be more comprehensible if we contemplate the utterly different shapes and tones we become to ourselves in the course of twenty four hours. Our immediate subjective image of our daytime self, its shape, its solidity, its pale colour, has little to do with the deep inwardness of self in darkness, an image in which the idea of our centrality can shift from head to heart, to belly, to the very tips of our fingers - to the exclusion of all else. Feeling has no shape.’’ € 40,000 - 60,000