Lot 38 Robert Ballagh

Robert Ballagh (b.1943) L'ORIGINE DU LANGUE Acrylic on canvas, 48'' x 67'' (112.5 x 171cm), signed with initials & dated 1990, inscribed verso. Apocryphal meetings between artistic personages recur in the work of Robert Ballagh and his friend Micheal Farrell. Ballagh, for example, had painted himself talking to Johannes Vermeer in The Conversation and painted himself into an Albrecht Dürer in his Homage to Durer. Prior to the opening of The Commons in the early 1990s, Michael Fitzgerald commissioned a number of artists, including Ballagh, Farrell, Tony O'Malley and Louis le Brocquy to produce paintings to hang in the restaurant. They were given a theme: James Joyce and his masterpiece, Ulysses. The subject was right up Ballagh's street in several respects. For one thing, he'd published an outstanding photographic book, Dublin, in 1981, that was not only a portrait of the city a la Ulysses, but also addressed Joyce's Dublin, with many references to and quotations from the writer. Several years on, in 1988, he made a painting, In the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis, in which he depicts himself strolling with Joyce in O'Connell St. He drew directly on the this work for The Commons commission, adopting the same technique of reproducing in paint the effect of a greatly enlarged vintage photograph. Rather than O'Connell St, he depicts the buildings to the east of St Stephen's Green, with Joyce himself sitting overlooking the scene, in company not with Ballagh but with the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. Why Magritte? In his book of photographs, Ballagh wrote of Joyce: ''…just as he transformed this Dublin into the world in microcosm, so too he charged the insignificant with significance. This ability to see something special in the simplest of things has also been my goal…'' In his paintings, Magritte invests the language of everyday vision with significance, making us think about perception completely anew, just as Joyce did via the written word. In Ballagh's painting, Magritte extends an orb - ''the world in microcosm'' - as a gift to the writer. Aidan Dunne, 2011