Damien Flood
TILT
March – June 2021
Flower paintings abound in a new body of work by Damien Flood, intended for the artist’s forthcoming and first institutional solo show called TILT in the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallery, March – June, 2021.
Damien Flood Crying Man (Skull), 2020 Coil wound earthenware clay, metallic glaze with distressed golf leaf.
Culturally, decorative, but used for every occasion in life from birth to death, cut flowers in painting – a veritable industry in 17C. Netherlands - are also, of course, intended as a moral jolt, a memento mori. The French call it : “nature morte “. Dead nature. The seed for these paintings was sown during Flood’s discovery while on a Centre Culturel Irlandais - Paris, residency in 2018 of late flower paintings by Edouard Manet. The French master painted the daily flower deliveries like Roses in Champagne Glass ( 1882 ), Tulips and Lilacs in a Crystal Vase ( 1882 ) from his deathbed. Flood paints Blooming Pint Glass ( 2020 ) and Bean Can Oak ( 2020 ) with a grittier realism.
“These paintings are the vigorous outcomes of urgent, intense imaginative processes, and the products of a insistently independent artistic spirit”
- Declan Long
To describe what is before you visually or emblematically in this show is an impossible task. Smaller paintings like Rapture, Cellscape, 56 x 46cms, Sprouting Rock, 76 x 56cms, take the tussle between figuration and abstraction, vegetation and mark- making to a screeching new pitch. In Concave Garden ( 2020 ) 76 x 65cms, one of a number of paintings set against an infinite, fading blue, the flower arrangement is confused with, causes or is caught up in the most baroque dynamic drag and removal of paint. This swirling motif and gesture recurs in Flood’s painting since Display Model ( 2017 ), and earlier. In Concave Garden, clouds - or are they Damien’s shorthand Wicklow mountains – float in the margins under a zig-zag eel’s eyeball - or is it the artist’s thumbprint in paint ? The paint, in patches in this painting and in Sprouting Rock, for example, appears more like spores that might continue to multiply afterwards.
Damien Flood Concave Garden 2020 Oil on canvas 70 x 60cms
“We are drawn into Flood’s fictional and intriguing world. As viewers, we cross this threshold and wander through the extraordinary landscapes presented to us.”
- Roisin Russell
New paintings and fired, earthenware hand-made unique ceramics by Flood in the forthcoming TILT are nothing if not gripping images of the intensity of life and death jumping off the canvas or concrete plinth. In the case of the unique, exotically hand-painted Horizon ( 2020 ) 19 x 17 x 17cms earthenware vase tendrils of pure yellow paint protrude at right angles from the vase’s surface as if the painted, decorative ribbon fronds are coming to life. They also remind the artist of Van Gogh’s tendrils of yellow paint dangling from his paintings in the same Musée d’Orsay.
Damien Flood Horizon, 2020 Coil wound earthenware clay, with oil paint. 19x15x15cm
“Damien Flood's enigmatic paintings tantalise and beguile. Like a forensic investigation of a Hieronymus Bosch, in which the earthly and unearthly delights have been atomised, Flood's fragments of disembodied shapes and forms, hover and cluster on perfectly balanced canvases... ”
- Gemma Tipton, Frieze Critic's Guide, 2016
TILT teems with life. It is also a paen to the world and the planet which we inhabit, too often disrespectfully and (self-) destructively. Flood is also tampering with the tradition of painting, creating new rules of description – and reversal - and composition not just in each show but in each painting, even reminiscent of how a cubist still life might use an abbreviated curve or arc to say absinthe glass, table leg, etc. The play and shape-shifting in these paintings is mesmerising and rolling.
Damien Flood Landscape Gradener, 2019 Oil on reversed balck primed canvas with Raku Fire ceramic figure, 150 x 125 cm
Crying Man by Damien Flood, 2019 Coil wound earthenware clay, metallic glaze with distressed golf leaf. 15x11x11cm
“There is always the temptation to assign meaning to abstraction. But Flood’s work resists any kind of narrative conclusions. Flood’s grasp of the purely inchoate that is testament to his prowess as a contemporary painter, with the same abstract verve of Amy Sillman, but muted and pared back.”
- Gemma Tipton
“What has resulted from these two years of research and making is the show Tilt. The exhibition juxtaposes the new ceramic work against a series of new paintings. The ceramics sit upon handmade brass, cement, and steel stands, evoking delicate and industrial aesthetics. The cracking white Grinners stare dead-eyed into the space presenting their 22-carat gold teeth in a humorous grin, celebrating, and embracing our inevitable ending. They evoke notions of long-lost Aztec artefacts and simultaneously limited-edition collectables from a local comic shop. Alongside these sit a series of Crying Men on their concrete plinths, bathed in flaking gold lamenting the futility of desire. They speak of our need to collect and own and its failing connection to being remembered”
- Damien Flood
Grinner by Damien Flood, 2019 Coil wound earthenware clay, metallic glaze with distressed golf leaf. 15x11x11cm
TILT
Royal Hibernian Academy Gallery
May 10th to August 1st 2021