C108 Review

Dublin: Paul Doran at Green on Red

Paul Doran: leave it alone, 2001 - 2003, oil, 30 x 25 cm; courtesy Green on Red

Paul Doran goes further than before, exploiting the characteristics of oil, in his second solo show at the Green on Red Gallery. He pushes his work into a syntactical rediscovery of painting as a complex interplay between the visual, apparatus, process and discourse. He gives us sumptuous masses of smeared or scooped layers of colour, inviting us to reconstruct the work. Wisps of paint hanging off the extreme edges act as pointers, telling how he catches falling excesses and then recycles them back into the work. On occasion he splices into the surface skins, allowing the insides to spew out like lava. Where the canvas is abandoned, the structures become organic, shaped by clinging polyps or furrows of extruded paint straight from the tube.

Paul Doran: wonderful, wonderful, 2003, oil on linen on board, 23 x 23 cm; courtesy Green on Red

In the painting wonderful, wonderful the title suggests revelry in its making whilst another 'talks' back to the artist, telling him to tell himself that the painting is complete, in a work entitled leave it alone. One finds oneself watching and waiting as the artist does, for the work to end itself as gravity pulls on hanging elements, changing them. In contrast, we admire the aggressive manipulations that risk the collapse of these fragile "sculptures" into a muddied mixture.

Doran takes the discourse of reflexive painting itself under closer scrutiny through critical experimentation. In the fractured, impure nature of the paint there is felt an immediacy, complexity and paradoxically an inability to ever 'nail' the work in one viewing.

Mary Theresa Keown is a painter currently working at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Co. Monaghan.

Paul Doran: Paul Doran 2004, Green on Red Gallery, February / March 2004