The Assisted Sublime

Darren Murray

01 December 2006 - 01 January 2007

Kevin Kavanagh is pleased to present The Assisted Sublime, an exhibition of new paintings by Darren Murray.

Using the medium of paint, Darren Murray reproduces conventional and banal landscape images taken from calendars and travel brochures. Colours are extremely intense, with a restricted palette, almost exclusively composed of primary and secondary colours, completely unnatural. On a uniform, flat and homogeneous pictorial background Murray traces the outlines of the base elements; instead, the parts of the landscape in the foreground, like silhouettes, are full, uniform, monochrome, and painted without any use of chiaroscuro. Only a few details closest to us (flowers, birds…) are portrayed naturally.

The antiperspectiveness, the creation of depth through various levels and the spasmodic attention to detail that denotes traditional oriental representation of space, find an original chromatic counterpoint altogether western in the pictorial work created by Murray. The choice of commonplace sources of his subjects shows how Murray also pays attention to the topic of a “commerical” use of stereotypic images that risk standardizing methods of figuration. The young artist from Northern Ireland adds an original and independent voice to the dialogue between Western art and art of the rest of the world, articulating the composition of a possible dialectic between different traditions and representative modalities.

Declan Long, 2006

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