CIARÁN MURPHY

The exhibition is made possible with the kind support ofCulture Ireland.

Ciarán Murphy’s practice grapples with the saturated, albeitfragmented, state of the image economy and the variousparadoxes therein. The title of the exhibition, still, weight, thingunderscores an interest in the cross-sections of visual language,where alternative meaning hovers just beyond the forefront ofunderstanding. The artist’s representations dissolve, reappear,and coalesce in a manner that suggests a very human, cognitiveobservation, contrasting with the credible, and thus predictable,nature of technological or mechanical image making.

These tensions are explored through various dichotomies withinthe paintings. The work sonomus places its image of a bird atopgrey ‘noise’, exacerbating the push and pull between foregroundand background. The painting windworld presents a set of arms that at once rest heavy yet float in isolation, weightless, in thepicture plane. Both portait and moon day hover between absenceand presence, lending themselves to another shared commonalityacross Murphy’s work: an evasive nature with subjects thatrefuse to be captured. Zebras rush into and out of the canvas inherd just as the driver in drive there appears partially withheldbut persists forward.

In the essay titled Earth’s Echo, published by the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, Dublin (IE) on the occasion of Murphy’s 2022 solo exhibition Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, writer Dan Fox states:

“The word ‘dreamlike’ would be an easy adjective to reachfor. However, that would make me wonder how a physical,tangible thing in the world, such as a painting on a wall,could be compared to the intangible, gossamer blooms of thesubconscious. A dream vanishes. A painting remains on the wall.“The artist explores “the moment of cognition, the instant that thesense of a thing emerges from a sea of marks and colors.”