GREEN ON RED GALLERY

Earthly Delights is in the title of Hieronymous Bosch's early 16th Century triptych The Garden of Eathly Delights.  This painting starts with the Creation, then the birth and fall of man and woman. It was painted in The Netherlands in the 1490s or early 1500s.  It is currently in The Prado.   It has captivated audiences and artists since that time, including some Irish artists.   The Garden theme is continued in Green On Red Gallery this summer looking at artists whose work looks at life and death and society, indeed at a world in crisis.Oisín Tozer is an Irish multidisciplinary artist.  His practice draws upon materials, media, and mechanisms of display to investigate how we understand and relate to the world, and particularly to nature.  Tozer develops discrete works that form interdependent relationships, culminating in visually spare, site-responsive installations.

Brassica Junea ( 2025 )  is a site-specific carving featuring imagery of the plant of the same name. It is rendered in reverse out of a dark blue background.  Straight lines of varying thicknesses coalesce to form an image. The mark-making is both delicate and aggressive.  These tensions reflect the dynamics of healing and ecological violence associated with this plant.  The plant is capable of absorbing heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and uranium from contaminated soil.  It is commonly used in phytoremediation.  This is a process whereby plants are used to heal land polluted by industrial practices, including mining and military activity. Moving between the registers of nature and culture, the plant can be thought of as both a remedy and a poison, its presence signalling destructive environmental practices yet, paradoxically, also embodying the capacity of plant life to heal.

In her description of Clair Obscur ( 2015 ), acrylic on polyester, a painting in the same family as Bagatelle 2, Bridget Riley draws attention to the fleeting shadows and shade that cloud and illuminate the painted surface.

Elsewhere, Riley says :  "I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, that the painting ' took place.'  Then, little by little, and to some extent deliberately, I made a layered shallow depth. It is important that the painting can be inhabited so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about in it credibly."

Bridget Riley : Reconnaissance :  Lynne Cooke and John Elderfield, Dia Centre for the Arts,  New York USA, 2001, p. 49. 

In Mark Joyce’s Bee Loud Glade monograph, he traces the interest, philosophical and scientific back to a number of sources as follows:

“ Does not bodies act upon light at a distance, and by their actions bend its rays “  Isaac Newton,  1704

“ Therefore, light is not a from consequent to corporeity, but is corporeity itself.  Moreover, it is the opinion of scholars that first corporeal from is the worthier and nobler and more excellent essence than all the forms coming after it. It is more than all other bodies similar and therefore is the first corporeal form. “  Robert Grosseteste 

Sorcha McNamara works as a painter; or more accurately as a maker of things.  But even 'maker' isn't really the right word.  It's too organic, too suggestive of the handmade, or the nobility of a craft.   Instead, she is more of a composer, a conductor, the person in front of the orchestra waving their arms about, whose function and purpose you may question, but you know are important for the stability of the whole piece.

Her approach to making things is simultaneously meditative and improvised; at once thoughtful and thoughtless.  Her eye attends to the overlooked, unnoticed or disregarded aspects of the everyday, focusing her attention towards material, objects and fragments that are often discarded, salvaged, reclaimed - holding traces of a previous existence or entirely ambiguous in their origin.  With this stuff, she constructs and orchestrates work that sits in a threshold between painting, sculpture and image-making, questioning the relationship between the shape or presence of a 'thing' and meanings associated or placed within it.

" Alan Butler uses a variety of tactics to gather his samples- extracting files directly from a game's database, intercepting raw graphics files during gameplay, and, in the case of older (pre-1990) games, taking screenshots and manually isolating individual plants, pixel-by-pixel.

The resulting images are transferred to positive film and made into cyanotypes using a process identical to the one employed by Anna Atkins.  Representations of phenomena in the digital realm- also known as digital 'assets' - are usually understood as qualitatively different from real-world things.  But the boundary between the real world and its digital counter-part is fuzzier than it first appears, and this ambiguity is partly what attracted Butler to the project: 'So much of what we think of as 'nature' exists in the image world or comes from the image world at least, and it has become clear to many by now that 'the cloud' isn't 'virtual space' - it is a physical network of dirty materials / energy con-sumption.  For me, this series is situated in both of these spaces.'  As a virtual botanist, Butler always has one foot in the real world. " 

" The abstract worlds I create at times teeter on the edge of edges, balancing precariously close to chaos.  Other times they are a celebration of life, sprouting unknown gardens and vistas in a colorful explosion. They can appear like a waking dream leaving the viewer in a state of hypnagogia, drifting between the sleep world and our own. "  Damien Flood. 

Damien Flood’s paintings stem from an interest in early writings on philosophy, theology, alchemy and the natural sciences. He uses these as starting points to explore the mutability of reality and language. The paintings he creates balance somewhere between landscape and figuration. They are psychological portraits and maps to different worlds.  They expand on his interest in how we see and read the world, sometimes in a more direct and humourous way.