Contributed by Joe Fyfe / Fergus Feehily, who is from Ireland but has lived in Berlin for years, is an unusual contemporary visual artist by virtue of his very careful degree of quiet obliquity. One almost hesitates to approach writing about him and, in this case, writing about his writing. It might be best to get the disclaimers over with: we share gallery representation in Köln, from Galerie Christian Lethert. I have met him a few times. Once we had breakfast at Balthazar in New York and I remember how thoroughly he buttered and spread preserves on two sizable croissants. Feehily is somehow obscure but in plain sight, admired among an informed coterie of artists and collectors and an avid sharer. He does a lot of communicating. He posts on Instagram often, mostly very different kinds of artworks, though he appears to have something of a penchant for religious art. On his website are long year-end lists, an annī of enthusiasms for what he has read and listened to and looked at, whom he has met and spoken with.
Feehily has published several small books, pamphlets, and brochures that touch on aspects of his works in relation to things in the world and a full-scale catalogue of 230 pages with color plates on coated, shiny paper interspersed with light, pastel-tinted dull paper stock on which are printed two essays by others, comments by the artist, images of found art, notes, and other relevant images, published by Zolo Press in 2023. His artworks have been exhibited regularly in Europe, Tokyo, Mexico City, and New Zealand, and in American museums in Texas and Minnesota, but New York has bypassed him for at least a decade.
Feehily’s output is consistently small-scale: rectangles placed mostly at medium height, far apart or en ensemble, all of them varying around the size of a tea tray with service for one or two. But he will often design their installation, visually rhyming a selection with a given interior architecture or adjusting an exhibition with plinths, hand-built tables and additional objects, notes, and clippings. His picture-like situations often include painted, painterly passages on the main plane, and found or constructed frames, hand-colored or made of wood and often discreetly secured by brass screws. Hardware, brackets, hangers, and frontal, surface-mounted cleats or straps might hold an inventory of paper samples mixed with fabric swatches in place.
Any number of other bricoleur-like improvisations are made based on the general notion what a pictorial object is or might be is operative, but is always metaphorically suggestive. The cover of his Zolo Press catalog reproduces Dovetail (2011), which is simply a seven-sided section of grained wood with a hanging fold of gray-green organza approximating the lower left corner. One couldn’t quite term his pictures abstractions because although there is no imagery – save one that mats and frames a small landscape photograph – each item selected for some fragment or whole of the frontal plane or edge has some recognizable character, or seems to. This also applies to the collections of painted gestures that feature in a good many of them. Though I assume they come from the artist’s hand, it often feels as if they have been seen someplace before.
I think this is intentional and had the same thought – that his pieces might all be quotations from elsewhere – when I began reading his light green pocket-sized book of about 68 pages, The Horse and The Rider, published in conjunction with his current exhibition, “Fortune House” at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin. The book consists of a series of paragraphs, some taking up more than two pages, many less than one, their status as singular units indicated by double spacing. Each page of text is of a proportion that will allow no more than 150 words per page. It’s beautifully and subtly composed, a reminder of the fine craftmanship of Irish writers and their sensibility: working with the materiality of text, as if each plain word has been handled, considered, and inked before it’s fit onto the paper.
As I progressed through Feehily’s pages the first person, the “I,” appeared, but the writing still has been lightened of its authorial presence, as if he wanted the teller to recede, leaving only the tale. The book consists of capsule cultural and musical histories, anonymous and personal, alternately recounted everyday life events and flaneurie – someone glimpsed on the street, for example. There are brief aesthetic arguments that might refer to his pictures but double as reflexive observations of the book itself, like the short entry about the Beatles’ White Album that has it “constructed out of songs and pieces that feel at odds with one another, that almost fight each other in some way.” Or another about walking through the National Gallery to a painting that may or may not be by Courbet: “The lessons of authorship around this work do not lessen the painting nor lessen the value of the journey through the rooms to find it.”
Feehily might agree with the attitude Ellsworth Kelly described during his early Parisian period. He said that at that time he felt that he was “more interested in the physical structure of Paris … the stonework of buildings and bridges, the vaulting of a cathedral or a spatter of tar seemed a more valid and instructive and voluptuous experience” than art. Kelly’s early paintings came from observing how a shadow falls across stairs or the lines of a tennis court, and some of Feehily’s verbal descriptions are of how the light from a window hits his filled bathtub and a tree reflects in the water. “This image I find so fascinating is barely there or anything at all; it is almost nothing.” Remembered moments are transformed into word pictures embedded in the flow of the narrative and are correlations of his visual art.
The book’s epigraph, from John 14:2, reads: “In my father’s house there are many mansions… I go to prepare a place for you.” This well describes its form and the Bible is included among the bibliographic sources (titled “Further”) along with every book, record, and performance mentioned, at the end. He cites two films – 2001: A Space Odyssey and Derek Jarman’s video Blue – which I bring up because the book’s abrupt transitions as it moves forward made me think of montage, its shuffling of motifs being perhaps the primary technical support and model for Feehily as both a writer and an artist.
I have an intuition that he has read the diaries of Joseph Cornell. Cornell practiced a kind of spiritual non-separation aided, in his case, by the writing of Mary Baker Eddy. His immersion in French Romantic culture along with Christian Science connected him to the wonders of the everyday, evidenced by diary entries wherein he admires Schumann’s Carnaval and in the next breath “birds in the trees/in the rain.” The Horse and The Rider asks who the Horse is and who the Rider is. It’s about the artist and the world. Feehily’s special thanks in the colophon opposite the title page goes to a very old friend, Jay Roche – Jay Hōdo Roche, an ordained Zen priest. He gives a talk on the exhibition and publication available online. With this connection and influence in mind, it’s not too rash to find Feehily’s art, for all its disparateness, to be about the intimate interrelationship of everyone and everything.
“Fergus Feehily: Fortune House,” Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 5–9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2, Ireland. Through February 23, 2025.
Fergus Feehily, Zolo Press, Brussels, 2023.
About the author: Joe Fyfe is a New York City-based painter who also writes. He recently participated in the exhibition “Regarding Kimber” at Cheim & Read and had work in the group exhibition “The Shape of Color” at Peter Blum Gallery. He received the Rabkin Prize for visual arts journalism in 2022 and is currently working on a biography of the artist and critic John Coplans. He is a contributing editor at BOMB.
interested to hear of Feehily’s art–and to know of the Temple Bar Studio and Gallery. I will be in Dublin in April and will drop by to see show that follows Fergus’s….