Salon at Lismore Castle Arts Turns a Gallery Into a Room for Looking
At Lismore Castle Arts in Co. Waterford, Ireland, Matthew Higgs has done something disarmingly simple: he has put chairs in the gallery and asked visitors to sit with the paintings. The exhibition, Salon, runs until October 25 and brings together 40-plus works by as many artists, arranged in dialogue with an eccentric assortment of seating borrowed from the adjoining Lismore Castle.
The chairs are part of the point. Carved gothic thrones, stackable school chairs, and a sleek geometric black metal design piece face the paintings, shifting the room from a place of quick circulation into one of slower attention. The gesture also lightly unsettles the castle’s own grandeur. Lismore Castle, a 12th-century structure later transformed by a major Victorian makeover, still carries the ornate imprint of A.W.N. Pugin, the architect associated with the UK Houses of Parliament.
Higgs, who directed White Columns gallery in New York for more than 20 years, has built the exhibition around what he calls “maverick artists”: some self-taught, some outsider-ish, and others formally trained but drawn to adjacent sensibilities. He has also made no secret of the personal nature of the selection, saying that he knows or has met 90% of the artists in the show. That intimacy gives Salon its loose coherence. The works are not stacked salon-style, but grouped by faint affinities — family ties, shared palettes, overlapping subjects — and each is given its own white-painted “window” against the gray walls.
The effect is both individual and collective. Denzil Forrester’s intense portrait of a baby Haile Selassie sits near Kaye Donachie’s romantic female head and Diana Cepleanu’s cool self-portrait, a trio linked by subject matter but separated by temperament, history, and method. Elsewhere, Gillian Carnegie’s grisaille tree, Bill Lynch’s small floral painting on salvaged wood, Andrew Cranston’s book jacket image, Merlyn James’s “Bird House,” and Stephen McKenna’s cloud and moon studies extend the exhibition’s range. McKenna is the only artist with two works on view.
There are also sharper surprises, including Margot Bergman’s altered thrift-store painting of a dockside scene and David Byrd’s work, a reminder of an artist who spent most of his life as a psychiatric orderly before gaining recognition shortly before his death in 2013. In the end, Salon argues for painting as a field of productive differences — and for the gallery as a place where looking can be social, unhurried, and quietly exacting.
