What a municipal solo is for

Tide Lines is still a few weeks out. I have been walking the galleries at Charlemont House with Cullen’s Atlantic studies in mind: how much sky a municipal wall can take, and how little explanation a visitor actually needs.

Public looking

A civic gallery asks a different question than a commercial solo. Not ‘is this available’ but ‘can this hold a room that also holds school groups, lunch-hour wanderers, and people who came for the stained glass.’ Painting that was made slowly should be allowed to stay slow.

The argument of the hang

The large canvases will take the long wall. The kitchen-window panels sit lower, closer to the body. I am not interested in a chronology. I am interested in temperature — how cold the blue was at four o’clock, and whether a public can still feel that in Dublin in daylight.