Aidan Dunne considers the work of four artists, whose paintings are on view in the atmospheric space of Rathfarnham Castle
In its title, the group show ‘Shifting in Silence’ refers to a publication by the Lebanese-American painter, writer and poet Etel Adnan (1925–2021). As it happens, all four artists had recently read and liked Adnan’s book Shifting the Silence (2020). A meditative collection of thoughts and perceptions, often relating to mortality, the book was published just a year before her death. It encapsulates her exceptionally free spirit, her openness to ideas and connections and her essentially creative outlook, all underpinned by a firm moral sense. It’s fair to say that, for Adnan, the silence she mentions is at the heart of things, charged with potential: ‘The universe makes a sound – is a sound. In the core of this sound there’s a silence, a silence that creates that sound, which is not its opposite, but its inseparable soul. And this silence can also be heard.
This silence is the preparation of things to come…’
A Bach lute recital on television, she writes, brings her ‘into the core of a silence that underlies the universe: underneath the mesh of sounds that never cease there’s a strange phenomenon, a counter-reality, the rolling of silent matter. Silence is a flower, it opens up, dilates, extends its texture, can grow, mutate, return on its steps. It can watch other flowers grow and become what they are… Silence is the creation of space…’
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