Counter Earth at Green On

Damien Flood’s inaugural exhibition, Counter Earth, at Green On
Red Gallery opens Thursday, January 28, 2010. The exhibition
consists of all new paintings on different supports, mostly
modest in scale. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-
illustrated catalogue.

Flood has shown himself to be a painter of exceptional
originality and flare. His work breeds uncertainty, more
questions than answers. His paintings could be described as
visual contradictions and incomplete. We are not sure what time
period we are in, what place we are facing or even what planet we
are on, such are his inventions of unpeopled mountains and
valleys, microworlds and firmaments. Light levels and palette
are crepuscular to nocturnal. His scenes are without incident
and often don’t add up, either because he paints a world more on
an immeasurable microscopic scale or, simply, his settings are
carefully incomplete. The tactic of incompleteness is one that
fantastically and teasingly draws in the viewer.

There is an engagement with the process and language of painting
that is pure indulgence and pure pleasure to behold. Surfaces
are varnished, wet and/or dry, encrusted or washed, oil or half-
oil ground belying an intense exploration of the possibilities of
paint, both tried and tested and pioneering.

Another artist whose work raised similar doubts and uneasiness in
the eye and mind of the viewer is Wilhelm Sasnal. Of his work it
is written :
“ his painting…insists on a subjective approach that is under no
obligation to divulge its procedures. Thus it situates itself,
as art, within the contradiction between the sustained allusion
to moments of reality and the simultaneous sundering of a direct
connection to it. Its self-referentiality, which sometimes
achieves hermetic proportions, is nonetheless able to communicate
by substituting a deep intensity and visual conviction for the
declaration of its content. “

(Wilhelm Sasnal, Night Day Night, 2003)
Flood paints in this way, because he can. There is an openness
and play with his subjects in paintings like Optical Band Width,
Drip or Still Coast that reveals an artist and an imagination
constantly looking, remarking, inventing and returning. Strange
as it may seem as a reference, but in the work of Wolfgang
Tillman’s something of the same repetition of concerns occurs but
with an insistence always on the primacy of the image and the
independence of the work as a thing. In discussing Tillman’s
Abstractions Layne Relyea writes : “ the very fact that they get
talked about as ‘ abstractions ‘ highlights how all of Tillman’s
pictures carefully instantiate and manipulate genre ( still life,
portrait, landscape and so forth ), how they are pictures first
before they are pictures of some thing. “ Flood also combines
photography in this exhibition with his very accomplished
painting.

Damien recently graduated from from the MA in Fine Art in NCAD.
He immediately was selected to exhibit in the John Moores
contemporary painting exhibition in Liverpool followed by the
Saatchi Space in London during Frieze ’08. He has been in
numerous other group exhibitions including Anopseudonymous in
Five Hundred Dollars Gallery, Vyner St., London, the Mermaid Arts
Centre, Bray and previous group exhibitions in The Green On Red
Gallery, Dublin.

For further information please contact Jerome or Mary at 00353 1
6713414 or info@greenonredgallery.com

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