John Noel Smith's sixth solo exhibition entitled United Field Paintings: 2001 - 2005 opens at Green on Red Gallery with a preview from 6 ­ 8 pm on Thursday 20 October. A catalogue with an essay by Medb Ruane accompanies the exhibition and appraises a fecund, five-year period in the artist's oeuvre. The United Field Paintings are works whose canvases Smith has divided into three distinct planes: a vivid colour-field area at the top of the canvas; a band of ogham-like marks in the middle, and a swathe of heavily impastoed black at the base from which vibrant colour bubbles up from underneath its surface.
Medb Ruane has written:

"The place of the eye is central to Smith¹s art of desire. Like Van Eyck or the wonderfully obsessive Hans Holbein, Smith tests the relations between being and seeing, inside and outside, open and closed."

There has been growing interest in the language of Smith¹s work following his return to Ireland after a lengthy residence in Germany. In the autumn issue of Irish Arts Review, Ciarán Bennett observed:

"The incorporation of Berlin practices and perceptions into the established ogham constructs is almost a final integration of the painter¹s self back into the landscape of place, now called home in Wexford.The influences of German art thought processes, particularly of Joseph Beuys, both distilling ancient symbolism for contemporary practices, is inherent to a sense of place and magic.It is the unabashedly rigorous involvement in the act of painting, the obsessive revisiting of motifs that defines Smith¹s work. The personal iconography of the work, ogham marks, knots and colour planes, the frequent use of diptych and triptych panels, reflect his interest in making seductive and striking work from a controlled distance."

The next exhibition at Green On Red Gallery is new paintings by Paul Doran (24 November ­ 23 December, 2005). If you require any further information please contact Jerome O Drisceoil, Molly Sullivan, Karen Tierney or Jennifer Phelan