The “Sense of Place” that Jonathan Brennan invites us to share in this his latest collection of Belfast landscapes (and beyond) is a dislocated one. It’s a sense that’s far removed from the comforting notion of “home” that such a title usually invites.

Brennan brings the gently askew lens of the outsider’s eye to bear on these large canvases. Many of his subjects are abandoned places of commerce and industry, so myriad in the city he has chosen as his home for the last decade and a half. 

These decaying edifices that comprise the bulk (but not the extent) of the collection were once pivotal to the mercantile bustle of our most Victorian of Irish cities. They now haunt the landscape, invoking a sick, unmarketable nostalgia for a time and a place that we don’t even care to imagine anymore. You might even say they’ve forgotten their “place”. 

And Brennan’s sense of the familiar, of “place” – like a Robert Aickman story – is one salted with unease; A girl and her dog discover the ruins of an abandoned quarry on a beautiful summer’s day. The dog looks back at us. Unsure. Behind a wire fence, we observe a youth on a scrambler bike on an industrial ruin temporarily reclaimed by nature. Modern office blocks glower in the far distance, clouds darken on a sunny day. 

Some of these large canvases are deliberately rendered as if they’ve been reclaimed, having lain mouldering, unloved and undiscovered for years in one of the very buildings they portray. A hauntological feedback loop that lends further irony to the artists – and our – notion of “a sense of place”.

Unmoored from history, unmoored from memory and untroubled even by our “troubles”, these buildings, very physically real, are recast as uncertain shades reminding us of the impermanence of human achievement and the unsentimental quality of “progress”. The warehouses, stock rooms and factories – once minor temples of mammon – now stand as profanities to the very same. Caged, bound, abandoned – their final service to capitalism will be their inevitable destruction, enriching the earth for new capital. 

Belfast and indeed Belfast’s arts community are no strangers to the avarices and attentions of such “progressive forces”. Witness as recently as mere weeks ago, where a fire devastated The Cathedral Buildings (housing a vibrant artists’ community). That it was the fourth such mysterious conflagration in recent history to visit the North Street/ Donegall Street block of the city’s Cathedral Quarter (a stretch of real estate long-coveted by those doyens of progress: commercial developers) was lost on none but the most credulous.

Amidst the unlovely bruising and urban decay is Brennan’s rustic and lonely rumination on the hills that girdle his adopted city. The iconic telecommunication ariels that skewer the summits of Blacks/ Divis Mountains will be familiar to anyone who’s ever cared to look upward from street level in certain parts of Belfast. Even in this wild vista at the edge of town, there are the physical remains of a technology that’s fast outliving its usefulness. Perhaps this stark, beautiful painting is simply a relative newcomer’s view of what us complacent indigents take for granted (how’s that for outsider art?). And then again, perhaps it’s merely (merely!) a bloody lovely landscape. 

Speaking of bloody lovely, let’s not forget the sketches in pen that also make up Jonathan Brennan’s “Sense of Place”. Smaller, detailed, loving. Bold bright tributes to landmarks and places that draw him, and in turn, he draws. They act as a surprisingly personal and emotional ballast to the weight of uncertainty and impermanence unleashed in large canvas. These are drawings that the artist felt compelled to take, in a moment, an unalloyed celebratory reaction to those gates and stone rendered in Victorian splendour that mark the parks and cemeteries of our city. The dwindling places where public right of way remains free and unfettered. 

That these are emblems of our architectural past that have been designated heritage rather than heresy by the prevailing forces of neoliberalism that buy and sell our city… well, it’s something of a small victory. The life support on our much-beleaguered civic spirit still flickers after all.    

As for the pair of delightful experimental solargraphs of Belfast cityscapes that conclude the collection. Might they represent perhaps the most endearing, and earnest expression of the arriviste imprinting on his adopted home and vice versa? They might. They might also be incredible pieces of art arrived at in a gloriously haphazard and unintended fashion. I’ll take either…

After all, who are any of us to state what the intent of such a collection of art is? What even is a sense of place? That you’re enjoying this exhibition in a building with a colourful and useful history that’s soon to be swept away to make room for… profit, “progress”, might be the unintentional punchline to this collection. 

Knowing Jonathan though, I doubt it’s unintentional. And while you’re enjoying his sense of comic timing, please also enjoy his Sense of Place.