GROUP EXHIBITION

Sean Scully’s 5 x 4 foot painting on aluminium Landline Green Yellow (above) gives expression to the meeting of land, sea and sky. Six bands of deep colour agitate against one another, distilling the landscape to its most elemental forms through vigorous brushstrokes and undulating colour. Zhou Li’s 2 x 3 meter painting Landscape of nowhere: Water and dreams No.11 offers a rich and dazzling study of light reflected on the surface of water. Going deeper than optical sensation, Zhou’s painting uses water as a vehicle for introspection and reflection. In the artist’s words, ‘only when piercing the spiritual depth of water can we better understand ourselves’. In another study of water and light, moonlight illuminates a coastal scene in Merlin James’s painting No title (seascape), casting a white glow onto the otherwise desolate brown sands, and flickering on the surface of coarse, choppy waters.

Light and memory suffuse the landscape in Elizabeth Magill’s I searched for form and land (above). A row of conifers flanks a view into a blue mountain pass in the distance, while errant squiggles and acid-yellow orbs distort the scenic vista and hint at the fallibility of memory. The painting takes its title from David Bowie’s ominous and mournful ballad ‘The Man Who Sold The World’. A group of four archaeologists are huddled underground – perhaps exploring some neolithic burial mound – in Isabel Nolan’s painting Dead talk (archaeologists). Sunlight bleeds into a vivid pink sky as the subterranean and skull-headed archaeologists gather beneath a Celtic spiral, long seen as a symbol of life cycles and renewal. Untitled by William McKeown captures the openness of the sky, capturing the feeling of our emergence into light and reminding us of our proximity to the infinite.

Spatial experience is flattened, openedup and rendered anew in Nathalie DuPasquier’s In cortile (or In courtyard,above). Architectural forms are reducedto simple geometries that float in space,expressing their latent communicative spiritthrough the interaction of colour and space.Aleana Egan engenders psychologicalstates through enigmatic arrangementsof objects and forms – capturingpreverbal shapes as they form fleetinglybehind our eyelids, or the liquid forms ofmemories as they recede from the graspof consciousness. Suggestive rather thanrepresentative, they capture atmosphericshifts that feel open-ended, in a state offlux. Sound and image become co-existingembryonic forces in a new installationby Jaki Irvine. A murmuring heart-likeform is adrift on the surface of mysteriouswaters, its glowing red ember floating in aprimordial soup, its pulsations generatingan ambient and ethereal soundscape.

Finally, light can take on a form of warning,impending disaster, but also salvation. Aglowing red sanctuary lamp reflects ourseemingly constant state of emergencyand alarm in Siobhán Hapaska’s sculptureEarthed (below), a flashing red light andcoiling silver cable suspended from theceiling. In Paul Winstanley’s Interior with__a Large Window (Yantra), light streamsthrough the stained glass window of aModernist church interior. For this imaginarystructure, Winstanley looks towards post-war architecture in cities like Hamburg,where wartorn buildings are rebuilt in a styleassociated with renewal. **Brian Maguire**has long turned his attention to issuesof social justice, and his large painting inthis exhibition depicts a soup kitchen inPortland, Oregon. With figures populatingthe composition across a left-right axis, andlight emanating from two central figures inhi-vis vests, the painting has echoes of TheLast Supper – finding solace and redemptionin the sharing of food.

Press release courtesy Kerlin