Louise Paramour, Chandelier,
aluminium foil, 5m high,
1997

In one alcove, already detectable from a distance, is Louise Paramour's glitzy Chandelier. This five meter high aluminium foil chandelier is suspended in the lofty architecture, mimicking the heavy ornament of the space while exposing the ultimate fickleness of it all. Responsive to the surrounding ornament, without antagonising it, this piece appears rather playful. Its familiar air of trashy Christmas decoration serves the strategic purpose of relaxing the severity of Gothic ornament to make room for a post-Greenbergian aesthetic.

Asher Bilu's Tower of Hope..., etc. speaks of memory and sacrifice. Countless wooden splints painted in white pile up to form a five meter high Holocaust memorial. While this work is primarily intended to refer to the victims of the gas chambers as they embraced each other in their fatal moment, viewers are also invited to see this pile of match sticks as a reflection of their own problematic. Tower of Hope, etc. adopts the sacrificial theme of the Blessed Sacrament chapel. This theme is patent in the depiction of the Last Supper in its stained glass windows.

Chris White has used acrylic lacquer on fibreboard to present the chapel of St Joseph - the carpenter - with an installation of simple appearance and complex resonance. Geometric Gothick consists of 72 rings of variable sizes painted in six different colours. Laid out in geometrical order and following the floral motif in the tiles, these rings evoke the vibrant colours of the outward-looking Gothic windows above, but drawing the viewer's gaze down to the here and now of the floor. Minimal as it may appear, what we find on the floor points at the vast terrain of numbers and their combinations. The number of rings, as well as the play of threes fours and twelves that structures their arrangement insinuates a cabalistic intent. This direction is reiterated by the element of chance involved in the matching of colours and sizes (White arranged this selection by drawing numbers out of a bucket, an "unreasonable" method which effectively postpones any logical resolution to the work).

By combining numbers in a way that defers logical closure, White has made a successful use of the religious space to foreground the ongoing aesthetic engagement in the search for a universal mathematics that will embrace the world in its unresolved complexity.

Lauren Berkowitz's Celestial explores a related domain in a more introspective note. Four hundred chemical vats have been filled with golden coloured water to depict the process of transmutation in alchemy. This installation surrenders to the spirit of the place to invite some quiet contemplation.

Finally, the chapel of St Thomas Aquinas, the mystic philosopher, is brought into the twentieth century with Christopher Langton's inflated human-scale figures. St Thomas's rapture, as depicted in the stained glass windows, is contrasted with the images of popular culture that occupy the faces of Langton's wavering bodies. The humming of the machines that keep the air flowing through these sculptures calls to mind the banality of the mechanisms that keep the culture industry moving, and the modern self on its feet. The contraposition the modern 'air' with the old pneuma that animated St Thomas's mystical journey is charged with pathos.

It is ironic that the sacred space of St Patrick's cathedral should seem an unlikely setting for an art exhibition, when it could be rather ad hoc. The cathedral space is designed to make us pause and reflect, it invites contemplation. One could think of this exhibition, with its succession of thematic chapels, as a mimetic inversion of the hasty world of commercial interests, of the shopping arcade and the commercial gallery where aesthetics has become a perverse branch of economics. It would be simplistic to reduce the space for contemplation through art to a passing millennial fad.

Jorge Lopez
1997

Chris White, Geometric Gothik,
MDF, acrylic lacquer,
dim var., 1997

© The artist and
Courtesy of the artists..