Warren's new show sculpted of timber and steel
Renowned for his use of timber, Warren’s latest pieces combine that timber with fabricated steel and moveable elements. The title ‘Those who go/Those who stay’ is borrowed from two paintings in a seminal trilogy by Umberto Boccioni, one of the key figures in the Italian Futurism movement. Warren says Boccioni considered classical art to be dishonest, as nothing in the real world is static or complete.
“In 1910, while sitting in a tram, Boccioni noticed the people with him as it joggled along. Suddenly, ten people became four people became three people, as big shafts of light came through the windows and vanished them.” Studies of people coming and going from train stations became an element in Boccioni’s work.
Warren’s new pieces consist of monumental lengths of curved timber suspended from tracks in steel box frames. Within these, Warren investigates theatre, religion and movement. “It’s not like anything I’ve done before in terms of conventional art,” he says. “It’s not fixed; these things move and the whole narrative and story become something quite different.”
In keeping with the religious overtones, ‘Barbed Trefoil’ consists of three sculptures and alludes to the three crosses on Calvary. Warren has removed a side bar of the structure, which dramatically changes its dynamic. Another piece, ‘Pagina Pastorum’, is a tribute to religious pageants, while ‘Reredos’ parallels a church nave.
An influence in Warren’s formative years was the Irish sculptor, Frank Morris, who taught him at secondary school. “He would have instilled a love of timber and the working of timber,” says Warren.
Warren did a foundation course at Bath Academy of Art. “That was very exciting, but it was not what I wanted,” he says. “It was the tail-end of the 1960s; it was a great social experience, when hippiness was at its height. Frank Morris said, ‘why don’t you just leave it alone and come and work with me up in the Wicklow Mountains and do an apprenticeship?’ I said, ‘gosh, that’s what I really want.’ I’d been hearing him and his friends talking among themselves of art as being a way of life and I wanted something of that.”
Sadly, Morris died a few months later. Warren then spent a year studying English and philosophy in Trinity College Dublin, before returning to art. From 1971-75, Warren trained in sculpture in Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, under Professor Luciano Minguzzi, who made the second door to St Peter’s Basilica. Among the new works in Limerick, Warren has included a 1974 piece, ‘Bio-dynamics’, “as a salute to the Italian part of my education.”
In Milan, Warren was exposed to Futurism. This was the breakthrough that led into modern art in the teaching of Italian art history, as opposed to the French system of teaching through the prism of Cubism, which Irish students learn.
Warren was interested in the fourth dimension, which the Futurists theorised in their investigation of spatial dynamics. “‘Bio-dynamics’ is meant to be the sum total of everything I understood about Boccioni, and theories of dynamism, and everything like that. He said, ‘look, we have to fracture everything up, we have to let our canvas in painting have these lines of force, as he calls them, coming out from the centre in order to encircle the spectator to come in’.”
The course in Milan taught anatomy to a level that rivalled medical school.
As a young man in Italy, Warren considered “all the Renaissance stuff” to be old hat. More recently, he has travelled to Tuscany, visiting all the basilicas and little churches. Last year, he toured the Piero della Francesca fresco trail.
Warren’s ‘Predella I’ and ‘Predella II’ are in response to della Francesca’s paintings. In these, Warren has taken 1964-ply Habitat chairs and remade then in Spanish chestnut. The struts in the back of the chair are reconfigured to represent the proportions of the golden mean, the optimum ratios used in Renaissance painting.
Warren’s ‘Tempo Rubato’ is low-lying and occupies the central floor. Its rocking movement is like a mariner’s compass suspended in a gimbal, and so Warren selected several paintings of timber boats on Limerick’s docks to hang around it.
While looking through the collection, Warren was “gobsmacked” to come across a drawing of his he had forgotten. Drawings by Warren are a rarity, as his sketches are usually done “on the back of a packet of cigarettes or the like.”
The drawing was collected by former gallery director, Paul O’Reilly, who saved it from the scrap heap while visiting Warren’s studio in 1997.
Among the other works Warren selected is ‘Cows come home’, by John Shinnors.
This can be said to close the circle, as it revives Warren’s memories of bringing the cows home during his childhood on the family farm in Wexford.
* Runs in Limerick City Gallery of Art until Mar 21.
