About
For the past twelve months, during a time of transition at the gallery, we have, from time to time, worked on projects with artists who are not represented by the gallery. This exhibition, of new paintings by leading Irish artist, Stephen Lawlor, will be the last of these projects.
Taking its title from the chemical symbol for copper, Cu, will comprise fourteen small, rich paintings, of the extraordinary and unique panorama surrounding two ancient and disused mines, sited on either side of the Irish Sea: at Avoca, in County Wicklow, and at Mynedd Parys, near Amlwch, on Anglesey and situated as they are at either end of the same copper seam as it emerges from the sea.
Owned at one time by the same company, both once thrived, but fell into decline in the mid-nineteenth century, and disrepair in the mid-twentieth. Left behind is a landscape built of a fabulously rich array of colours betraying the vast cocktail of minerals found in its soil. It has a magical presence. Lawlor is aware of its randomness, and has tried not to reproduce it objectively. He has abstracted the colours, the form, and the scale to distance himself from anything literal and to reference the processes that played upon each area, from volcanoes to industrialisation and the social and environmental consequences of it and recognises the potential of this naturally abstracted landscape, which offers a newfound freedom and perplexity to his work.
The land around Amlwch and Avoca has been through the wringer. At one time or another it has been washed and eroded, melted and burnt, gashed and lacerated and wounded and scarred, oxidised and bleached, and modelled and moulded. And Lawlor gets this.
The paintings have lively, fresh surfaces that suggest immediacy and a level of excitement and looseness and freedom in their making, but they are, in fact, highly cultured. They are considered, and knowing, and referential. Indeed, his work is as much about his own intensive study of painting as anything else, and among his group of diverse influences are painters with similar concerns: Hodgkin, Auerbach, Guston, de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, but also Constable, Corot and Claude. Paint is the key issue; and colour; and light and shade, which give the work the drama and energy and movement, present in beautiful landscapes of the Wicklow Mountains and Mynedd Parys.
