Cavanacor Gallery

Painting pictures of sadness and loss

May 14, 2003

Aidan Dunne

Felim Egan, Cavanacor Gallery, Lifford, Co Donegal

“….Felim Egan's exhibition at the Cavanacor Gallery brings him close to home: he was born just across the River Foyle in Strabane. The Cavanacor show marshals a significant body of recent paintings. Although he can certainly be described as an abstract artist, Egan has increasingly accommodated landscape references in his spare, elegant compositions.
Here his Soundings 3 series, together with Woodnote 3 and other pieces, points us towards sea and land.
He characteristically creates an overall textural ground, built up with powdered stone, and usually in a muted colour or shade of grey, although on occasion he will use a very intense colour. The unity of this ground is interrupted or offset by the intrusion of other elements, most commonly small grid ladders or wedges of different colour. It is quite a simple, limited formal vocabulary and one that Egan has used, with some variations, for a long time.
There is ample evidence, however, that limited means are no hindrance to the creation of interesting paintings, and Egan's ingenuity lies in the way he dextrously manipulates a few pictorial elements to produce consistently engaging, challenging compositions. By pushing his pictures towards the atmospherics of water and light - more, perhaps, than landscape per se - he generates a productive tension between image and object.
He undercuts the authority of the single, homogeneous image with the geometric wedges. Previously, he has implied musical associations in his painting, and these small coloured elements can be viewed as suggesting the intrusion of sound into space.
Although there is a reflective calmness to the work, it is altogether more even and upbeat than Hooghiemstra's melancholy deliberations…”

 

Copyright 2003 The Irish Times