DAMIEN FLOOD – HISTORY OF THE VISITATION
2011-11-28Flood’s practice has evolved in rich and fascinating ways. He continues to push and exploit the potential of his primary medium, oil on canvas, with intriguing results. His world is expanding in alien directions, apparently devoid of natural light or sometimes about that light. Equally it is unashamedly and indulgently caught between, on the one hand, an abandon born of an abstract use of his medium and, on the other, maintaining one limb in the “ real “ world. The boundary between “real” and fictional, however, is no longer meaningful in Flood’s vocabulary.
Never one to stay in one place for too long, he has for The History of the Visitation, produced a corpus of paintings and objects that is as diverse, unpredictable and open as ever. No one overriding theme emerges.Flood’s world or New Geography is, at times, microscopic in its focus but in spite of or even because of this can very quickly lead us to an imaginary vast expanse.
All is never as it seems or straightforward or even stationary in Flood’s work. In Dot Dot Dot and Rock and Cylinder, for example, one painting supplants another in a reversal of strategy or is it a doubling up of narratives. No one reading is possible or, if you go by previous belief systems and bodies of knowledge, like the one quoted by the artist : the world according to the now discredited 17th Century theoretician and cleric Athanasius Kirchner, desirable.
Opposite – Bench (2010)
Exhibition runs through to December 10th, 2011
Green On Red Gallery
26-28 Lombard Street East
Dublin 2
Ireland
