Conor Harrington: Ireland's Baroque Graffiti Master

All sound and fury

The only issue of Irish Arts Review magazine I ever bought was the one with a Conor Harrington on the cover. Not that I have anything against the magazine, I was just thrilled they were finally recognising the guy. Turns out they weren't, but it was still as arresting a cover I'd seen of theirs. I first encountered Harrington's work when a guy I worked with in London appeared after lunch one day having just bought a print of his looking fairly pleased with himself. Right after work I shot straight over to the gallery in Soho where there were the conor harrington prints for sale. It was just one of those especially pleasant moments when you discover an artist in any field and it really connects with you. I was arrested right away by the insanely vivid colours in the graphic-design feel mixing with the old school comfort of  someone's sheer technical ability in rendering a vintage style figurative piece. I'm not saying Maser couldn't reel off something like this (in fact they recently collaborated) but the part of me that likes looking at Caravaggio met the part of me that likes Stefan Sagmeister and for the first time the two of them sat down and shared a beer. 

What Harrington does so well is hit you with the visual equivalent of comfort food, old nineteenth century style dramatic figurative portraits, and distress them, tangling them in exaggerated smears, wipes, colour blends and striking fraphic-design style layout techniques now pretty common in urban graffiti. He takes the road originally tread by Caravaggio, in laying down black as the base from which everything spreads, heightening massively the visual contrast, the to overlay an urban palette of eye-searing primary colours, contrasting the bold, flat line of what would be considered pretty traditional graffiti fare, with the subtle, blended chiaroscuro and sfumato more modern graffiti artists are using almost casually. Which is a fancy pants way of saying he does shading pretty well and it looks nice next to black and flat colours. It's the scale and drama of the pieces that take your breath away though. Those two guys having a rumble are giants, like fucking Gulliver, stumbling around that side street wall. It's not unusual to see large pieces now, but it still feels strange to see an image you'd expect to come across in a museum or national gallery collection, smeared over off-grey spackling and let drip so the whole thing looks like damaged film.

What I like about the images is what I think they mean, at least what they mean to me. Anyone who's read John Berger's Ways of seeing or anything influenced by it, will be pretty familiar with the idea that traditionally, art was a weapon used to maintain the social status quo, by lauding images which enforced an idea that the wealthy and powerful were somehow, well, better, than regular shmoes like us, something to be aspired to, to dream about becoming, rather than question. Kind of like episodes of the Kardashians. Conor Harrington takes the language of this kind of social hegemony, always considered the paragon of refinement and unimpeachable quality, but in actual fact brutal and calculating, and marries it with an art form traditionally  associated with social protest on behalf of the voiceless working class masses. He's not the first to do it. he won't be the last, but the way he does it is just so fucking cool. It kind of reminds me of that old war movie 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', by Tony Richardson, which uses every visual trick in the book, down to costume, grain of film, lighting and colour to convey a feel of an established biopic of wartime heroics, only to absolutely lampoon and tear down every character on screen as an idiot. And all of it looking just gorgeous. Dead Meat and When we were kinds are especially good examples. Finding an original conor harrington for sale would be phenomenal, as would being able to afford it. 

He doesn't necessarily mock the characters within his pieces either. In fact, I'd say he's pretty much revelling in the high dramatics this old baroque style of painting can yield up, and the contrast they offer to how an artist can tag an urban street wall (down to the effects of a badly handled can of spray paint).  Our whole concept of what is beautiful in art has been absolutely defined by this traditional, salon, academic style of painting since before even guys like Giotto were accepting commissions. We have a contemporary art world struggling to redefine what we think of  as aesthetically pleasing on either a visual or intellectual level, freeing itself from pictures of gallant rich guys and their possessions and dramas. I like Conor Harrington;s work because it challenges how I relate to it. I like the comfort-food, mashed potatoes and gravy, of the salon style portraits rendered with expert care. I can't help it. But I love how new it feels. I love how cheeky it is. I don't feel angry or full of class warfare or even challenged politically at all very much. Maybe there's something to be said here about the Bullingdon Club feel to a lot of the characters, the way the upper class is portrayed as violent, blood soaked, armed. Something to fear. 

But the pictures are visceral, steeped in the counter reformation feel of high-drama, rich colours you could almost want to eat, laid down against the cold electric pinks, blues and burning oranges in razor sharp straight lines, or muddied in and out of  what look like layers of wall tags going back years. Walls in public spaces used to belong to these depicted characters, now they belong to us. The revisionist feel of taking something old and worthy and turning it on its head is something that appeals especially to me. I've recently had a book published which takes the old Irish myth Deirdre of the Sorrows and retells it as an absurdist modern murder mystery. I'm currently working up a story drawing in everything from Gatsby to Great Expectations to the Matrix. I think this is where things are now. We're only now beginning to understand aesthetics and what they've always meant. we're starting to look at pretty things which have always been accepted from a social perspective. You couldn't be blamed for fostering some hope based on this kind of an outlook.

Alan Walsh


If you're interested in re-visioning old pretty things, my novel, Sour, retells an old Irish myth as a modern absurdist murder story.