Frieze.com Review Declan Long
Mairead O’hEocha’s paintings take peculiar, beguiled pleasure in the low-key scenes they calmly depict. Some of her best pictures have been prompted by quotidian curios or fleeting revelations: a gorilla ornament at a garden centre; a merry-go-round glowing against night sky; a petrol station’s circus-mirror reflection on the surface of a streaming canal. Each discovery is met with measured, distracted delight. Each becomes a quietly spellbound painting: distilled and designed as a tidy arrangement of zesty highlighter tones against cooler, moodier shades. Sometimes, their ostensibly good-humoured outlook seems comparable to the wide-eyed crediting of everyday marvels in Robert Walser’s sto- ries, a writer for whom, as William H. Gass has said, ‘everything is fresh and astonishing; to him everything presents a pleasant puzzle.’ But if her paintings are immaculately concentrated re- cords of insouciant noticing, they contain trace levels of mel- ancholy too. O’hEocha’s worldview is intermittently enchanted, but not innocent. (Gass scatters comparable adjectives around Walser’s style: ‘sad, removed, amused, ironic, obsessively reflex- ive’.)
Mairead O’hEocha , Vallayer-Coster Rose 2016. Oil On Board 73 58 cm
If, at times, O’hEocha’s work evokes moments of fugitive serenity – the tipsy late-night peacefulness suggested by that luminous petrol station scene, for instance – there is frequent severity, too. In Hoarding, Lights and Rain (2014), the bright, diagonal streaks of a downpour are more like laser-beams than raindrops. Very beautifully, they slice the picture to pieces. The bizarrely radiant colours of Chopped Trees, Castle Leslie (also 2014) — lively stripes of lilac, lime green, baby blue and more — decorate the sundered remains of a destroyed tree-trunk, absurdly sugar- coating a brutal image. It’s sweetly jarring, like cracking your tooth on hard candy. Despite such jolting contrasts, the variously tough and tender effects of these paintings feel mostly unforced. And however downbeat things get, a degree of light-heartedness – even light-headedness – persists. Rarely does O’Eocha seem inclined to scale the slopes of a grand theme. Rather, she crafts gorgeous, offbeat odes to low-lying, ordinary landscapes, prizing the calculated inconsequentiality of her subjects.
O’hEocha’s newest paintings – seven of which feature at Moth- er’s Tankstation – also seek latent vitality in undervalued material, this time by turning her admiring attention to that most banal of art genres: the still life. Cryptically titled ‘Blackbirds in the Gar- den of Prisms’ (2016), this body of effulgent botanical painting is, perhaps, more deliriously sensuous than much of the artist’s work to date. Zoom in on the bursting, drooping blooms of Plant Dressage with Escaped Cobra – a medley of scarlet, creamy white, and pale blue flowers against a glamorously intense black background – and we see the intimate micro-world of O’hEocha’s reticently excited brushwork: dainty smears, smudges and scrib- bles that bring these fragile organic forms into lustrous being. Paintings such as Omnivourasaur and Ring Flash Bouquet are bravura outcomes of O’hEocha’s apparent relish in the task of representing, and re-imagining, differently sinuous floral growths. Still life, pursued with such rapt persistence, must be an exhila- rating aesthetic test –despite, or, even, because of its historically circumscribed status. (O’Eocha has in mind the genre’s relevance to the erstwhile predicament of women artists: once prevented from partaking in education relating to the ‘higher’ classifications of representational painting.)
Mairead O’hEocha - Plant Dressage with escaped Cobra 2016 - Oil on board 80 x 58 cm
Source: Frieze.com Declan Long
