Julian Meagher’s paintings reflect more than a fascination with tattoos. In them we find a site of nexus, where ancient traditions are brought together to represent a contemporary condition.
Read MoreWith his training in medicine contributing an empirical basis for techniques learned as a student of painting in Italy, Meagher’s work layers the real and the symbolic in a way that acknowledges the multidimensional and fragmentary nature of life as we experience it today.
Here parts of the whole are fractured off and pinned like specimens. Isolated for our consideration, they remain eerily ghosted by what is absent. Through the cool lens of clinical observation this artist produces work that is a meditation on the act of representation – painting on painting.
Such a twinned exploration of the art of body decoration with the art of representation embodies the tension that once divided and categorised life and art itself. At the same time, however, it imparts a sense of the possibilities now emerging for new acts of inscription upon life’s palimpsest.
