John Cronin

John Cronin is one of Ireland’s leading abstract painters. He has been exhibiting internationally since the late 1980s. His work has been exhibited alongside the likes of Cecily Browne, Ian Davenport, Mark Francis, Howard Hodgkin, Callum Inness, Jason Martin and Seán Scully.

While his work’s primary concern is abstract painting in the age of artificial intelligence, the titles of his exhibitions often reflect a desire to add a thematic twist to each new body of work. Through a diverse range of exhibitions, including Standard Deviation, Augmented Reality, MHz, and ZXX we have seen him continually extended the language of his practice. Cronin has gleaned praise from many quarters most notably from the eminent New York Critic Donald Kuspit, who says - ‘he puts the “juice” back into modernist painting, after Greenberg’s post-painterly theory squeezed it out.’

The ARTIFICIAL BEE COLONY paintings. The ABC paintings are a witness to their coming into being – a process at once slick and crude, with elements of the works breaking down both compositionally and in their very materiality – once-luscious oil paint is cracked, dried and exhausted, arid patches vie with free-flowing organic rivers of paint, watched over by morphing, pathologising and destructive elements. The colours, while less kaleidoscopic than in previous works, are still vibrant and acidic playing with opacity, layering and translucence. Each piece has the same compositional elements, but the order of the application of those elements varies resulting in quite different outcomes. The title comes from the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. This algorithm is a swarm-based optimisation technique that simulates the foraging behaviours of honeybees and is used to solve continuous optimisation problems. The algorithm, however, has several drawbacks, such as difficulty solving discrete optimisation problems and is susceptible to numerical noise. So many of the algorithms that are beginning to govern our daily lives, are trained by our culture, and are learning to automate historical bias. AI perpetuates a feedback loop that can degrade the abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human at a time when the world is coming to terms with historical, racial and gender injustices.