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Scotsman
- 23rd August 2008 By Susan Mansfield
Irish artist Ian Healy is engaged in a more ideological battle in his show at Atticsalt, targeting religious belief in all its forms with the fervour of Richard Dawkins. He has painted a series of Hollywood actors who have played priests – Marcello Mastroianni, Robert Mitchum, Bing Crosby – apparently to illustrate how easy it is to dress in religious garb but be a complete sham. A painting of Dracula actor Bela Lugosi as Christ in a passion play seems to have the same aim, but it becomes something rather more poignant.
Healy's paintings are clearly more about concept than paint quality. Not unlike Warhol, he is using portraits to illustrate (and undermine) ideas: radical Islamist Louis Farrakhan, scientology founder L Ron Hubbard and 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta are all subject.
But by far the best works here are the "trinity" of charcoal drawings: Padre Pio, the "stigmata man", whose shaggy beard evokes photographs of terror suspects; Richard Chamberlain as Father Ralph in The Thorn Birds, the priest-as-love-interest, and Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope, as a young man in the uniform of the anti-aircraft brigade in Nazi Germany.
These are complex works, perhaps more complex than he intends. When we look at Joseph we see beyond the uniform to the intelligent but vulnerable eyes of a young man. There is a lesson here about the power of subtlety and skill. Religious belief is a persistent and complex phenomenon, and art that engages with it, even antagonistically, needs to acknowledge that complexity. A bit more subtlety and a bit less tub-thumping would have made this a stronger exhibition.
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