RICHARD HEARNS

Hearns’ practice is rooted in the physical act of painting, where composition, materiality and mark-making take centre stage. Charcoal lines traverse the surface, carving space and generating movement, while layers of paint accumulate through gesture, revision and response. Instinctive, gestural movements are balanced by a considered approach to composition. As with many of Hearns’ paintings, the canvases are scaled in relation to the artist’s own body, reinforcing the physical dialogue between painter and surface. Each mark becomes an extension of the body’s movement, with energy channelled through the brush and into the canvas. The resulting works possess a palpable physical presence, recording the gestures, rhythms and intensity of their making.

In this latest body of work, Hearns extends his investigation of thresholds; spaces of transition where the familiar gives way to the unknown. The exhibition’s title, No Ruined Stones, reflects an understanding of landscape not as static scenery but as an enduring witness to the passage of time. Against the vast chronology embedded within the Burren’s limestone formations, human existence appears fleeting, yet profoundly connected to the cycles of creation and transformation that shape both the earth and the act of painting itself.

Reflecting on the works, Hearns writes:

”I’ve been on a narrative ascent. Now past the threshold I’m confronting a monolith. It is something I recognise. It goes way beyond the object itself—it’s moving—penetrating beyond space, time and causality. That’s what painting can become—a completely transportive vessel. And where do I go from here. Always moving. It’s still entirely a mystery.”

This encounter with the monolith becomes a metaphor for painting itself: a form capable of exceeding description and opening onto experiences that remain beyond language. For Hearns, the studio is a place of continual discovery, where each painting emerges through an intuitive dialogue between intention and chance. The work embraces uncertainty, proposing mystery not as something to be resolved but as the condition through which meaning unfolds.

With “No Ruined Stones,” Hearns presents painting as both an embodied act and a transportive vessel - one that connects the physical world to states of wonder, possibility and contemplation.

Rather than offering fixed meanings, the exhibition opens a space in which viewers are invited to cross their own thresholds, encountering landscape not as a destination but as an ever-unfolding experience.

Richard Hearns is an Irish painter based in the Burren, County Clare, whose practice spans both figurative still life and large-scale abstraction. Born in Beirut in 1980 and adopted into Ireland, his dual heritage informs a distinctive visual language rooted in gesture, materiality, and the physical act of painting. After studying at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology and the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Hearns established an international exhibition career with solo shows in Dublin, London, Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles, New York, Abu Dhabi, amongst others. His paintings are held in significant private collections worldwide.