7th February 2025 – Exhibition

Damien Flood: As Above, So Below

Green On Red Gallery is excited to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Damien Flood, his 7th solo show with the gallery in Dublin, followed by another solo presentation of his work this year at Art Brussels ( 24 – 27 April, 2025 ) Booth 5E-37, Brussels Expo, Halls 5 & 6, Place de la Belgique 1, 1020 Brussels, Belgium.

This exhibition sees the artist further explore his interest in the history and materiality of painting. Culture is born of civilization, a tool to question the world around us. Art can bring us closer to understanding that world. This has been a core concern in Flood’s work since he started. Using abstract and representational painting and sculpture is, for him, a way to dissect and upend the world, showing us a way to look and to see afresh.

Meditations on death and the afterlife continue to abound in As Above, So Below.

FROM

7th February 2025
—28th March 2025

More

Urns and vessels of different kinds first started appearing, fragmented, in Flood’s paintings in 2018 before they were realised in glazed and painted ceramic, independently of – though sometimes accompanying – the paintings. The artist describes them as “definite moments in the exhibition space”. Around this time, during a residency in Paris, the artist discovered the late, luscious ( death-bed ) flower paintings of Edouard Manet which inspired a new group of his own still life, flower paintings, continuing the memento mori theme.

“When you lose loved ones, that shatters your understanding of the world and questions grow. These questions about life and why we are here are monstrous. You can’t answer them. But for me art should ask questions. It shouldn’t really give answers because answers suck the magic out of everything.”

 The artist in conversation with Cristin Leach in The Irish Arts Review Autumn 2022, Memento Mori,  p. 72

In Redeemer ( 2024 ) above, for example, a grinning and anatomically exact skull stares straight at us from the centre of the painting, not unlike the image in the centre of Flood’s For After Ever ( 2022 ) 3-track album, recorded by the artist to coincide with Dig, the artist’s previous solo exhibition at Green On Red Gallery. There is no avoiding the morbid message but the painting itself is teeming with life and objects, some bursting through the linen and stretcher from behind.

 

Flood’s once illusionistic dark oval “ openings “ have led to intrusions through the back of the canvas from where more painted canvas fragments, gold-tipped poking ceramic fingers, beads, glazed ceramic leaves and more, invade.

Certain works sprout ceramic foliage while painted fabric theatrically flows and twists through the canvas plane. The white ceramic foliage also alludes to the plants atrophying in the air once they have left the two-dimensional plane.

These new paintings are full of life and play and passages of seductive oil on canvas from impasto description to bare minimum information and line. Or is it outline ? What is not there is nearly as important as – and held in tension with – what is there. Absence and presence vie for your attention.

Like in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille*, this could be a conversation with the afterworld, but exuberantly, inventively and stylishly told.

* Ó Cadhain, M.  Cré na Cille   Sáirseál Agus Dill  Baile Átha Cliath  1949

 

In As Above, So Below, Flood finds glorious and multiple ways of expanding the possibilities for representation on the painted surface, while attacking or puncturing that surface, akin to breaching the fourth wall.  Paintings fold in on themselves in anti-gravitational reversions.

Even the frame is now confused with the painting by being stretched, in the case of Torn Landscape ( 2025 ) ( above ), in the same raw canvas, an ingenious final twist in the poetry of this painted world. Flood’s interpretation of the artist’s frame sewn together from studio scraps of linen and tacked to the edges; a canvas framing a canvas.

Ever inventive, ever fragmented and ever fractured. Plenty to look at. Plenty to follow. Plenty to piece together as Flood continues to expand his repertoire and to push the limits of painting on canvas, including painting with canvas.