Conor Foy - Fight or Flight

 

A slightly edited (different last sentence) version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 31 May 2015.

Fight or Flight is the title of Conor Foy's new show and many of these quietly disturbing pieces are suggestive of violence just past, or pending. Foy's work is based on images from the news media or from camera phone footage. He harvests elements from these online sources to create his subtle and resonant paintings. The artist, an NCAD graduate based in New York says: "In these pieces, painting's stillness is used as a meditative counterpoint to the rapid fire of news media." A number of the paintings such as Down 3 feature what look like dead bodies and others contain kneeling figures who seem to be awaiting or undergoing punishment. The titles such as Stick, Down and Guidance are cryptically suggestive. While the overall sense is that there's not much good news here, we do have plenty of room to speculate as to the exact nature of the bad news. Guidance 3 looks like the prelude to a beheading, but maybe it's just going to be a beating. Three of the pieces are entitled Muybridge after Eadweard Muybridge famous for his photographic studies of animals and men in motion. The ambiguous Baconesque images in these paintings are both a homage to that artist and an acknowledgement of his debt to the pioneering photographer.

Molesworth Gallery

Dublin 2.

John P. O'Sullivan


 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Tom Phelan - Quiver at the Molesworth Gallery

A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 20 July 2014


For a man who loves surfing as much as Tom Phelan it must be frustrating to live in Vienna where the mild beauty of the Danube hardly compensates for the spume filled thrills of Strandhill. But Phelan is an artist and the pain from his thwarted love affair with the waves has been transmuted into an arresting and colourful series of paintings in his new show at the Molesworth Gallery. Quiver, the title of the show, refers to a collection of surfboards of different size, shape and vintage. A surfboard is a fetish object where the aesthetics of the board are as important as its function and this gives Phelan an opportunity to play with its alluring geometry and brilliant colouring. The ambiguity of the term quiver also conveys the oscillation between abstraction and reality - between colour field and figurative. Phelan uses Casani birch panels for these paintings and the grain of the wood plays its part in the images - as well as recalling the early wooden surfboards. The surfer's field of dreams, the sea, also features in this impressive show.

Molesworth Gallery

John P. O'Sullivan

 

 

Posted with Blogsy