Ciarán Bennett previews ‘Returning’, an ambitious show of sixty new paintings at the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, celebrating painterly skills, and aptly so, as all four artists are recent winners of the Hennessy Craig Scholarship
This exhibition of four painters who have recently been awarded with the Hennessy Craig Scholarship at the Royal Hibernian Academy, represent a distinct strata of painting at present in Ireland. The vaguely representational nature of their practices also engages with post-modernist tendencies of appropriation and commercial media, such as television. The apparent ease with which the images appear to engage with memories of place and aspirational desires for suburban utopias also pursues the latent romantic content of such aspirations. The darker side of these images references the suburban angst of David Lynch films, where all is anything but serene beyond the manicured landscapes and pastoral sublime
