C110 review

Lifford: Eamon O'Kane at Cavanacor Gallery

Eamon O'Kane: from Building series, 2004, acrylic on canvas; courtesy the artist

Eamon O'Kane uses modern architecture as a source for his black-and-white drawings, with their large empty areas, differently than for his polychrome paintings. The scale is different too. The drawings echo architects' technical drawings of a building in a projected environment, usually viewed from below the level of approach. The trees and shrubs, pools, ponds and garden furniture are ornamentally placed to enhance the selling power, the aesthetics of ownership saturated with status.

Eamon O'Kane: Overlook 12, 2004, oil on board, 12 x 17 cm; courtesy the artist

The paintings, in the mode of an Albertian window, set the buildings behind a foreground with further depth enveloping them. Often the darkness and light assist the fusion of the man-made and natural forms into a dense matrix.

Both drawings and paintings examine various types of desirable home / house, and - in a psychological and topological transfer controlled by the artist - the ideal artist's studio.

Compared to Courbet's iconic L'atelier du peintre, 1855, O'Kane's studio not only does not exist, its multiple images compete in a neurotic catalogue of possibilities.

Courbet elevated a lower genre, the artist's studio, to the level of huge history paintings; he called it "the moral and physical history of my studio" ¹ and said, "It's fairly mysterious. Interpret it, he who can!"².

O'Kane appropriates a lower genre of architect's drawing, and of simple snap photography, and forges for them a place in an aesthetics dominated by major art, i.e. painting. Umberto Eco recognized this tendency as a shift to an "unstoppable polytheism of beauty," which in itself is a healing answer to the "double caesura" that traversed the twentieth century.³ He coined the term "total syncretism" for art that continuously reassessed its own traditions by reconciling opposing principles, beliefs and practices.

Slavka Sverakova is a freelance writer on visual art.

Eamon O'Kane: The Studio, Cavanacor Gallery, Lifford, September - October, 2004

¹Letter to Jules F.F.H. Champfleury, autumn 1854, transl. Francis Frascina, 1984, OU, A315, Broadcast Notes 1, p. 4
²Letter to François - Louis Français, late 1854/early 1855, ibid, p. 5
³Umberto Eco, On Beauty, transl. Alastair Ewen, edited extract publ. in The Guardian, October 2, 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.96
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