Westport artist Neil McCormack opened an exhibition of paintings at the Ennistymon Courthouse Gallery and Studios, County Clare last Saturday evening May 16. The exhibition continues until May 30.
Superficially, Niall McCormack's recent work deals in a familiar visual currency of the most tangible feature of the now-fading Celtic Tiger years: The burgeoning property market and the proliferation of housing units that have become a ubiquitous subtext to the contemporary Irish landscape. McCormack, it seems is presenting as an appositely familiar artistic metaphor. His meticulously rendered structures evoke architectural accuracy, and are effected with painstaking attention to detail. And yet these uniformly windowed housing units and agglomerations lack doors or chimneys - features that would render the structures practical and habitable. Thus the buildings enter the realm of the surreal, ciphers that reflect the artist's own concerns.
The faceless uniformity of McCormack's houses creates a sense of disquiet and foreboding, of soullessness. It speaks of isolation and the contradictions of living together but being apart - a house not as the clichéed home but rather as an instrument of separation, of incarceration, even. The long, hard shadows cast hint at the melancholic urban landscapes of de Chirico or Sironi. The houses are located within an amorphous landscape of contours and horizons devoid of many features that would impart a sense of authentic, gritty reality: Even the silhouettes of Croagh Patrick and Clew Bay (the geography of the artist's own experience ) exist as schematic notes: Context uncontextualised.
