The works in this show are culled from two series of paintings: the first takes as point of departure from simple still-lives created in 3D software, and the second from snapshots from my first trip to Europe a number of years ago. The simple still-life scenes (which, of course, do not exist in reality) with their crisp, fetishized geometry describe a technical way of assimilating the visible world—computer graphics in general, don’t represent a ‘recreation’ of reality any more ‘perfect’ than painting does, but through the use of elaborate mathematical shortcuts, averagings and magician’s tricks provide an arguably ‘real’ experience bordering on optical verisimilitude. It is precisely those shortcuts that make this way of ‘organizing’ reality resemble representational painting to some degree. These scenes resonate with the clear pictorial organization in the snapshot landscapes of touchstone monuments and locations where this way of conceiving is identified as having gained so much traction within our culture. They reinforce the same sort of austere cultivation of abstraction of form so prevalent in the roots of the West, and emphasize the role of meditation upon their remains as a primer or initiation of sorts for a thinking participant in, on or around the Tradition. Indeed, ‘primitive’ may always be a charged term when we speak of art and/or culture, but here it refers innocuously to the base volumes that make up the still lives and alludes to the simple, but not simplistic relations with the world of ideas difficult to exclude from their contemplation.

Chris O’Connor