Marianne O’Kane Boal previews Simon McWilliams’ exhibition at the Naughton Gallery, Belfast where architectonic forms rendered in intense colour project a Kafkaesque scenario
Simon Mc Williams was born in Belfast and trained at the University of Ulster followed by the Royal Academy School in London. He has exhibited in Belfast, Dublin and internationally in London, Santa Fe and Los Angeles and is having a solo exhibition on his home ground of Belfast for the first time in almost twenty years. In McWilliams’ painting we get a definite sense of the exploratory, his studio becomes a laboratory for pushing the limits of the medium, form and texture. The buildings appear to be portraits of existing architectural forms, exactly represented but this is not in fact the case. They are rather ‘an armature upon which I use to build a painted surface of colour, texture and form that in some way alludes to the subject matter but not entirely’. All is not as it appears on first examination and there are inherent contradictions in the paintings that invite us to engage further and look more closely. We are invited to respond to architecture afresh as the artist does. According to the artist, ‘There are aspects of both the pure movement of pigment on a canvas and the description of the subject matter that intertwine to reveal something about the nature of both; it is that aspect of the subject matter that interests me not a portrait of a building or place.’
In his assessment of Fitzgerald Kavanagh and Partners’ award-winning Student Centre at UCD Seán ó Laoire charts the evolution of Ireland’s largest campus since its foundation
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