There, Not There features the work of five contemporary Irish painters – Felicity Clear, Elizabeth Magill, Mark McGreevy, Paul Nugent and Orla Whelan, who explore within their individual practice the boundaries between memory, perception and time.
Each artist plays with the properties of paint, photographic references and personal experience to interrogate the blur between the natural and the fabricated image, and the real and the perceived, and question how the memory processes what is real and what is imagined.
Many of the paintings offer a subtle lie or an exaggerated truth, and the substance of the paint is used to articulate the concerns of each artist. Felicity Clear uses light, thinly applied, acrylic paint to create heavy, unsettlingly unpopulated urban landscapes, while Paul Nugent´s traditional technique of oil painting and glazes conveys layered meanings of subjectivity and experience. In the paintings of Elizabeth Magill, the paint activates palpably familiar yet strangely foreboding landscapes. Mark McGreevy luxuriates in the rich fluidity of the medium, creating distorted realities whilst Orla Whelan denies such privileges to the oil paint in her paintings forcing the luscious energy of the flesh to be a static skin.
How the mind processes vision is dependent upon a subjective amalgamation of the past and present -sometimes what we perceive to be real is different to what we have viewed and experienced. In merging the image of a photograph with the images from the cognitive and the imaginary, the paintings in this exhibition present a shared sense of memory as if the images created by the artists could belong to the viewer´s own experience or dream.
