C104 review

Lifford : Felim Egan

Felim Egan: Passage with blue, acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 120 x 120 cm; courtesy Cavanacor Gallery

Close to where he was brought up, in Strabane, Felim Egan shows new work at Cavanacor Art Gallery in Lifford, Co. Donegal. Anyone who is eager to write about Egan's work knows that he has to queue up behind an impressive line of famous predecessors. Which point of view can be added to what has already been written by, let us say, Michael Longley, Marina Vaizey or Seamus Heaney? As such, the following is but a modest attempt by a colleague artist.

Lifford: Felim Egan When you consider Egan's paintings in Lifford, it is very seductive - especially for a Dutchman - but also too easy to relate them to landscapes, or architecture, or minimalism. They touch universal themes which go beyond visible reality. That is why they mirror the thoughts, the memory and the view of the beholder, they always will - it's the best guarantee for surviving the sieve of time. Important works of art do not try to force a personal truth on people, but give way to each and everyone's own truth. To reach this level, an artist has to scrutinize his very personal commitment to the point where the change takes place from personal to universal; the secret of spirituality. I suppose Egan's work is about Sandymount Strand, the light on the Irish sea, about music, the architecture in nature: it is about everything he has seen and experienced so far. I can imagine that, when he is working on his paintings, Egan is obsessed by colour, balance, structure, confrontations and irritations between space and intruding elements; it is all there, it has to be battled out on the canvas, the only reality that counts, unconsciously fed by all those other realities in the back of his mind. And I find myself, speechless, watching and unravelling, reading the report of the battle, while I hear a sad and distant saeta on the dusty planes of Spain, combined with images of Dutch skies and horizons in my head.

Huib Fens is a sculptor, poetry editor and professor at the Fontys Academy of Visual Arts in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

Felim Egan: Paintings and Works on Paper, Cavanacor Art Gallery, Lifford, March - May 2003

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