Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition called Clouds by Irish artist Patrick Hall and first shown in the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in February/March, 2002. The exhibition consists of three large oil on canvas paintings and small watercolour and ink paintings on paper. Hall last exhibited solo in the Green On Red Gallery in November 1995. His exhibition Paradise was in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in Nov. 2001.
Patrick Hall is one of Ireland's most acclaimed painters. He was a central figure in Dublin throughout the 1980's and 1990's exhibiting regularly in the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios culminating in an important exhibition, called Mountain, in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1995. He has since moved to Roscommon where he has been working towards this travelling exhibition.
Grave and biblical references continue to appear in the artist's work. Such is the strength and understatement of each painting that they carry themselves independently. Their wit, their reductivist composition and palette, their expansiveness and extremes of scale give them a particular narrative force. This carries the work beyond any limited, inherited, hermeneutic interpretation. These works belong to a particular, even rare vision.
Expanses of grey, brown or black - the earthen colours that predominate in this show - demand a kind of rapt, mute, silent response from the viewer. It is in these silences that we can become nervous, ill at ease and twitchy as we are confronted with the void and the unknown. But it is also in these spaces, often described by Hall in a crude, awkward way, that there is so much possibility, so much potential discovery.
It feels as if colour and incidental, unnecessary detail has been sucked out of these paintings. What is left has a fragile grip on the surface.
In Angels Ascending and Descending with Heavenly Spectators black stick figures are seen up and down a veil of black ropes the full 61/2 foot height of the canvas while two masses of white and beige spheres or presences float in a fleshy sea behind. This is the most luminous work in the show and is teeming with movement. It is also the work with the most ethereal and primitive, amoeboid forms. It could be a beginning or end, a climax or opening scene but the drama is concentrated and pulsating.
Born in County Tipperary in 1935, he studied in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art London between 1958-1960. In 1982 he was appointed member of Aosdána. Hall currently lives and works in County Sligo. His work has been previously exhibited in England and in the USA.
A Green On Red/Butler Gallery publication will be published this year with text by John Hutchinson to mark this new work.