Knockout
Oil on canvas
30.5 x 30.5cms
2002

Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of recent MFA graduate and painter Paul Doran. Definitely one to watch, Doran will exhibit approximately seventeen paintings. The exhibition opens to the public on Thursday, 27 June, 2002 and will run for approximately one month.

Paul graduated from the MFA Programme at the National College of Art and Design in 2001. As an up-and-coming artist, Doran's work enjoyed considerable acclaim when he exhibited at Hallward Gallery in 1999, as part of the Degree Show, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2001, in Contemporary 2001 at Green On Red Gallery, in ARTCologne, Germany, 2001 and, more recently, in The Armory Show, New York, in February of this year.

Doran's paintings are intimate in scale, typically measuring 30.5 x 30.5cms. They are painterly constructions of heavily worked skeins of paint which the artist trowels wet across the canvas. Doran paints with a rich and brilliant palette of oil colours which, when applied overtop one another, creates an amazingly dense, almost sculptural skin to the canvas. In some instances, the paint extends out and over the canvas board by several impastoed inches. Aidan Dunne has described Doran's work as, '"process painting" ... in which we are prompted to regard the painting itself, and the discipline of its making, as the substance of the work.'

As Doran himself explains :

" The edges of the canvases spill over with paint residues. These residues affect the material presence of the painting as object, as the paint no longer represents a window onto an interior space but comes off the edges of the canvas interrupting the works¹ exterior space and thus that of the viewers. "

Titles like Freeze, Knockout, Gorgeous, Supernova suggest either some of the associations that are possible when responding to these paintings or something of the effect of their self-asserting presence. While Doran¹s work fits into a genre of painting that is recognised internationally at present, his originality, even within this school at this early stage, is remarkably confident.