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JAMES HYMAN GALLERY
Hughie O'Donoghue (b.1953)
Please scroll down for further information. Hughie O'Donoghue (b.1953) No.13 Berlin 6 Hours 40 Minutes 24.3.44 (Red Letter Days) Oil on linen canvas 113 x 133 cms (44½ x 52¼ inches) 2008 Hughie O’Donoghue, in an essay for the publication accompanying the exhibition, The Geometry of Paths (James Hyman Gallery, March - April 2008), evokes the ideas behind these Red Letter Day paintings: “Late one October evening as I made my way home I went into a second hand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road that I had often passed. It was seven or eight o’ clock but the shop was still open and there were a few other customers looking at the books on the shelves. The layout of the shop and its slightly eccentric nature led me to follow a meandering path which led to the basement. In the farthest corner there was a shelf of similar looking volumes bound in brown cardboard with rudimentary labels. On taking one of these down I noticed that it had last been withdrawn from the University of London library, its former home, over fifty years earlier. The volume was called The Geometry of Paths by O. Veblen and T.Y. Thomas and though the text of this dissertation was difficult to follow it seemed to be explaining in an emphatic, if somewhat abstract way how the world was. Open the door and climb into the dark. You have to find your position, check the instruments, spread the charts, check the radio, check your pulse, check anything. Waiting on the frozen airfield until your number is called. No fear boys. This is the worst time. There was a time perhaps when there was no fear but that time has long gone. The place used to be called Cotton Farm before the three runways were hastily made. From out of your small window you can see the moonlight reflecting back from the snow and frost covered fields. The scene is one of disturbing tranquillity. The planes lined up in orderly rows have a certain aesthetic , though in essence they are just big sheds with wings, the heavy transports of death, a logical development in a process of collective irresponsibility from the earliest days of manned flight. The planes are painted black and make their journeys in the night, they are called Halifax and Lancaster, somebody thought it would be a good idea to name them after somewhere grim in the north. Made in Trafford Park in Manchester, built in sections by women wearing headscarves and bolted and riveted together at the Metrovicks factory. On the side of Lancaster S is painted the figure of a saint with a halo and the motto ‘he will be back’. As time has gone on the ambiguity of this image and its message has become unsettling to you. The numbers are starting to add up, the odds are changing, the laws of chance, of avoiding mishap, of getting back safely are starting to prey on your mind. The numbers are written in red.” James hyman in the publication accompanying the exhibition of these paintings writes that "for O’Donoghue, as for all painters at work today, to engage with the figure and to address the world in which we live means to work under huge shadows. One shadow is a century and half of photography and its appropriation by a range of artists from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol. Another is a world of wars and horrors. Brought together, the claims made for the immediacy, directness and fidelity of photography collide with a heightened sense of mortality, vulnerability and threat. But in today’s world of Photoshop and digital manipulation the veracity of such images - from TV news to the pages of fashion magazines - is constantly under threat. O’Donoghue’s challenge is to cut through such cynicism, to acknowledge that picture-making, like memory, is a construct - but to assert that nevertheless it retains the potential to strip away the veils, to address big themes and to speak to us all. By foregrounding the photographic, O’Donoghue’s paintings interrogate their own origins in memory, myth and document. Yet once read these works can jolt and startle with their immediacy. How, then, is one to account for their particular impact, the way that they unfold over time? Paradoxically it is this very incorporation of photography that provides the key. The sources are often personal not public, quiet not declamatory, intimate not overt. Immediate impact without something deeper bores. In contrast O’Donoghue’s paintings - whether or not they incorporate a photographic element - are slow burners. This has always owed much to the handling of paint and the way that a commitment is expected on the part of the viewer. O’Donoghue’s incorporation, rather than mimicking, of photography also suggests other more immediate allies. It is to Anselm Kiefer, working in Germany and France, and Zhang Huan in China, that one must turn for artists with a similar ambition. In each case the artist has included photographs in paintings that engage with the heavy weight of his nation’s past. For them, as for O’Donoghue, the land itself has a particular national resonance. Kiefer’s engagement with the blood and soil of Germany and Zhang Huan’s use of ash to depict scenes from Chinese history are matched by the materiality of O’Donoghue’s presentation of the land and sea of Ireland. The singularity of O’Donoghue’s achievement lies in the use he has made of his own family’s history, especially his father’s wartime experiences as a soldier in Europe. O’Donoghue’s paintings, with their insistence on every mark and brushstroke, are not just about excavating the past but also about the artist’s own engagement with it. These are insistently first-person narratives, in which the life stories of others - especially his own family - are re-imagined by the artist. In this emphatic subjectivity lies their strength and in this respect the artist’s own particular history is a key. It is surely no coincidence that O’Donoghue’s practise as an artist comes out of two of the dominant tendencies in painting of his own lifetime, and that both of these tendencies emphasise the touch of the artist as the sign of authenticity: abstract expressionist painting typified by Willem de Kooning, in which abstraction is deformed towards the figure, and School of London painting typified by Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, in which the figure is displaced towards abstraction. In his latest paintings O’Donoghue continues to incorporate photography but often it is completely subsumed by paint, a literal demonstration that whilst photography may be integral, it is painting that has precedence. On the one hand O’Donoghue’s recent paintings encapsulate the way that photography has changed our way of seeing forever, and on the other they reaffirm the artist’s belief in the continuing power of painting to re-imagine the past, personalise this engagement and connect with an audience." James Hyman Gallery, London Please click here to contact us about this item, or if you wish to buy or sell a work by this artist. | ||||||||
