Prints by Daniel Buren, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Michael Craig-Martin, Paul Mosse, Bruce Nauman, Bridget Riley and Richard Serra.

With thanks to Gemini G.E.L, Los Angeles and Alan Cristea Gallery, London

For further information contact Jerome O Drisceoil, Molly Sullivan or Amy Walsh at the Gallery for further details.

Fergus Martin has been exhibiting with Green On Red Gallery since 1994 and his artistic practice is primarily concerned with visual experience and how energy and form meet to effect our visual landscape. While Martin is primarily renowned as a painter, his practice has widened over recent years to include object-making, working with digital photography and collaboratively with Anthony Hobbs. This exhibition, Storm, is a show that returns to Martin’s original preoccupation with painting and post-conceptual minimalism. The exhibition will consist of five to seven canvases. These works are elongated horizontal canvases with colour cut into precisely arranged areas which contrast the smaller exposed fields of white primed canvas. The resulting tension between the physiological force of the colour and the geometric order of the canvas, create works that frustrate the viewer’s perceptual gaze. These works are elongated to the point that the viewer cannot take in the whole of the canvas at close range. They wrest the outer corners of our gaze in the same way that they at once reference memory and meaning and environment and presence.

When I lived in Italy I used to love the words mare mosso and mare molto mosso on the shipping forecast.
They were very haunting.
I remembered this when I was working. I made a rough dark colour which almost scared me to use but which made me think of the tug and pull of the sea.
I think this energy or memory is present in the different kinds of paintings.
Looking at them, I feel that the ones with rectangles force more energy into less space. So there’s a greater sense of compression. There’s more movement. Violent, almost.
I think of the paintings with squares as being slower - their presence, or inner movement, more brooding.
There’s a rhythm between all the paintings. They’re moving at different speeds, but they’re speeds of slowness.

This is Tom Hunter’s second solo exhibition with Green On Red Gallery and it coincides with his current residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.  Living in Hell and other stories was first shown at the National Gallery London in December of 2005.  These are carefully-composed, large-scale photographs, based on the artist’s re-staging of tabloid newspaper headlines.  Using friends and acquaintances as the protagonists, Hunter’s work compositionally reference classic Old Master paintings.  

Murder: Two Men Wanted is a photograph whose title is directly taken from a Hackney Gazette headline.  Its composition is based on Piero di Cosimo’s Satyr mourning over a Nymph which is part of the National Gallery collection.  In Hunter’s work, a woman lies sprawled across the ground in an eerily lit park, (it was shot in public parkland in Hackney which is notorious for criminal activiity at night) while a male figure, his expression shocked and bewildered, crouches beside her head.  At her feet sits an Alsatian dog.  His posture is one of loyalty and resolution as if he were guarding over her corpse. The subject may be linked to Ovid's Metamorphoses (VII, 752-65) in which the death of Procris is depicted.  

As Martin Herbert has written, “Bad news sells newspapers.” The Hackney Gazette, self-appointed mouthpiece of the East London borough where Tom Hunter lives and works, is not a free newspaper. As such it needs to gain the attention and money of its public, doing so by importing the standard tabloid formula of addicting its readership to a cocktail of horror and titillation: cue headlines like HALLOWEEN HORROR and LOVER SET ON FIRE IN BED.... The Gazette writers’ words must matter more than pictures, for a lack of photographic imagery will not stop this newspaper from running a front-page story. A curious mind will naturally tend to image the scene by itself, and such was the process that generated Hunter’s ongoing ‘Headlines’ series from the Gazette. These scenarios were isolated and turned into staged photographs, featuring friends and acquaintances and shot in Hackney.

Hunter’s work is about seduction.  We are inititially drawn, voyeuristically to the photographs to make sense of the drama, to participate almost as onlookers to an event that has already occurred.  In Hunter’s work there is a relaxed sense of normalcy to the tableau, an every-day calm and directness that the protagonists in the photographs exude.  It is only in the knowing (the titles) and the slow realisation that one has possibly seen this scene before (albeit as an earlier work of art) that the viewer comes to fully undertand the complexity and pleasure of engaging with Hunter’s work.

The character of Conor Kelly’s video and installation work is informed by his long experience as a musician, composer and sound artist, indeed the current work builds on a series of recent shows in which traditional hierarchies and modalities of the sound-image relationship within the moving image are explored. The tendency to experience video work as primarily visual, something that stems partly from the history of cinema as originally, and hence primarily, visual, is overturned, but, paradoxically perhaps, much of the work achieves this by visually manifesting ideas that arise from sound-based sources.

Pendulum takes off from Steve Reich’s early work Pendulum Music (1968), in which four dangling microphones swing across four upturned loudspeakers, creating first sounds, then melodies and finally a chord. Kelly eschews such musical allegory in favour of the visual drama of the microphone flashing across a loudspeaker whose cone fills the TV screen. Analogies are drawn between the monitor (vision), the loudspeaker (sound) and the microphone (movement). But the monitor also emits sound, and the loudspeaker and the microphone are visual elements in the work. Thus the categories of sound and vision are intermingled, or swopped over: for all that seeing and hearing are distinct modalities with dedicated sense organs, seeing is rarely soundless, and vice versa.

In Note, Kelly builds on an earlier five-monitor installation: Plainsong. “I shall be making some visual decisions based on audio information...there will be a perpetually changing set of loops…so although they are different works, the whole gallery will be on different length loops...each piece will bleed, so to speak, albeit at a low level, visually and aurally”. In other words, the resonant characteristics of a given room, and the way that individual works in a confined space inevitably interfere with each other must be part of the equation. In Plainsong the latter phenomenon was built into the structure of the work. Notes takes the process in a different direction: “mixed for a buzzing cacophony in a heap in the corner”, the piece allows the unsynchronised combinations of the sounds issuing from a quantity of TV sets, and the reinforcing, canceling and muddying reflections of the gallery walls freely to interact. It’s a piece that requires careful aural attention, yet which is none the less visual. It asks a question that Kelly has asked before: what do you look at when you’re listening?

Piano Note, also draws our attention to the visuality of music making: the sheer beauty, exoticism even, of musical instruments. The piano, with its regular pattern of contrasting keys (“ebony and ivory”) is a perfect analogue for the modern musical scale, with its regular, step-like intervals (This regularity masks a long history of “unequal” tunings). The endlessness of the keyboard, implied in its repetitive pattern of keys, is humorously played upon (sic) in Kelly’s piece. (Bosendorfer, a rival to Steinway, and the preferred brand for pianists as diverse as John Ogden and Charlemagne Palestine, make a piano with an additional octave in the bass).

The term Aerophone was coined by two ethnomusicologists, von Hornbostel and Sachs (such musical names!) It refers to one of four methods of generating sound, and would usually be associated with wind instruments. Here, however, it can be taken to mean that all sound ultimately involves the movement of air, regardless of its source mechanism. Air, space, the walls that define it and which reflect sounds in such a way that they can never be the same in two different rooms give this set of works its particular character, which, rarely, is both site-specific and site- productive.

Nicholas Hamlyn 2006

The next exhibition at Green On Red Gallery will be Living in Hell and Other Stories by Tom Hunter (27 April –27 May, 2006). If you require any further information please contact Jerome O Drisceoil, Molly Sullivan or Karen Tierney at:

The noon light is clear, and as a cloud of dew in the day of harvest
Isaias 18.4

This new series of small abstract paintings, Lux Clara (Clear Light) explores the anomaly of painting coloured light. The subject matter encompasses medieval glass and Newtonian Optics. These outwardly simple, yet seductive paintings are carefully constructed investigations into the conceptual underpinnings of mark-making and colour. Lux Clara is a continuing engagement with early aesthetics. Joyce wonders about colour, about light and about how we represent a spatial dimension with a two-dimensional medium. In Spring 2003, Joyce wrote:

"There are two anomalies which painters work with. The first anomaly is the tendency of the two-dimensional surface of a painting to take on a spatial aspect, once marks are made and colour is applied. The second anomaly is the painter's use of mineral-based pigment to depict conditions of light."

Mark Joyce studied painting in NCAD, Dublin and at the Royal College of Art, London. He was awarded the GPA Emerging Irish Artists Award in 1990. He will be artist in residence at the Albers Foundation in Bethany, New York in 2007. He has had Solo Exhibitions in Ireland, UK and the USA. His work is in the Public Collections of IMMA, the Arts Council, and the OPW.

The next exhibition at Green On Red Gallery will be a group show (9 February ­ 11 March, 2006) curated by Jerome O'Drisceoil and Molly Sullivan. If you require any further information please contact Jerome O Drisceoil, Molly Sullivan or Karen Tierney at: