I recently visited Hughie O’Donoghue’s exhibition, Time and the Architecture of Memory, at 447 Space in Chelsea last week, and attended a robust discussion between O’Donoghue and Phong Bui (Brooklyn Rail editor-in-chief). What struck me about these mostly monumental in scale paintings on tarpaulin, was the layered delicacy of materiality, photograph transfer, and sedimentation—painting as excavation.
These supports suggest travel, as one sees the evidence of fold marks, rolling, and grommets. In other words, they can be transported and installed somewhat easily, even at such a large scale. Reading in the press release that O’Donoghue works between London and County Mayo, I sensed a restlessness, two identities, in these works—as if the rural and the urban coexist in their making. These paintings reference history, art history and the present, oscillating between material density and lightness. O’Donoghue renders the fragility of our human condition and nature’s power, where memory and stories meet, in space and time.
I featured his work in Monday’s image a few years ago, from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s collection, and it was a pleasure to experience his paintings in situ.
