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Camac XIII

Artist (b. 1947)
Date2002-2003
MediumAcrylic on copper; Acrylic on gesso mounted on copper
DimensionsLeft : 49 × 39 × 6 cm
Right: 56.5 × 37.5 × 6 cm
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased, 2003. © Ciarán Lennon.
Object number1972
DescriptionCiarán Lennon has been painting in Dublin for over thirty years and has created a body of work of extraordinary singularity. His is an independent practice that has flourished away from the centres of modernism. His oeuvre has developed out of post war painterly considerations and his enquiry could be likened to that of many artists of his generation. Lennon's process is both analytical and spontaneous, this contradiction gives the work its power and mystery. Whilst the process is always visible, the effect is never straightforward; our assumptions in painting are questioned, the work is both transparent and mysterious. Ciaran Lennon's concern with seeing reveals a space initially explored though physically folded structures, which, in The Scotoma Group, is replaced by optical differentiations. Scotoma is a medical term for fields of vision that are non functional i.e. blind spots and Lennon presents us with three big paintings, 8' x 12' 'big enough for a person to walk into' where the large diagonal brushstrokes fold over one another. The artist's reference to early Renaissance painting and its corporal dimension present a singular articulation on form. This extraordinarily independent research continues and the clarity of vision and absence of rhetoric is manifest in our most recent acquisition Camac. In this painting the folds are replaced by a semi-transparent strata of colour allowing access to the painting process, coaxing the viewer into a collaboration or dialogue and thereby a participant in the visual experience.
On View
Not on view
Summer, June 1965
Brian Bourke
1965
Rings of Saturn
Isabel Nolan
2007
Familiar II
Alice Maher
1994
William Cosgrave
Sir John Lavery
1923
Close
Elizabeth Magill
2000
Girl with a Tinsel Scarf
William John Leech
c. 1912
Number 3
Robert Ballagh
1977
Lilacs
Sir John Everett Millais
1885
Untitled (Painting: Acrylic)
Charles Tyrrell
1981