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Painter Hughie O’Donoghue works in London and Ireland. His next solo exhibition, The Geometry of Paths, opened at James Hyman Gallery in London on March 6.
Hughie O’Donoghue, Fools House, 2007. Mixed media on wooden construction, 56.25 x 96.5 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin.I am immersed in the culture of painting and its potential for alchemical transformation. Central to the content of these recent works is the readability of the imagery. For these works, I have used photography as a component of the picture making process. The photographic element has a skin-like quality, which is physically integrated into the layered surface of the oil paint. In order to achieve the kind of density that I want, it is necessary to build the surface in a traditional way by superimposing layers of oil paint and exploiting the transparency and opacity of the medium. The photographic elements are trapped within these layers. I photographed the characters in the paintings in various scenarios on the land around the studio where I work. One of the recurring themes of my work is memory and how it is constructed. I am interested in both individual memory and the larger cultural memory of societies. Memory is rarely accurate, but in my experience it is invariably true, in that it represents how we feel about things rather than what we know. In this way it is like the art of painting.
One of the ways the paintings try to work is as a form of concrete poetry. The works here are mostly constructions. In many cases objects like old beams and rafters from the house I lived in are embedded in the surface of the panel and camouflaged with paint. While the surface of the painting tells the story of its own history, another narrative is also suggested, but left incomplete. Things are both simple and complex at the same time. This is to do with how one arrives at meaning; it is something that accrues and grows out of the process. It is not something external that can be understood by reading a text. Meaning is something that only comes when the actual painting itself is encountered. It can’t be received second hand. This is one of the things that I prize about the medium.
