Roisin McGuigan

Images Ghost through for Kerry Artist

Kerry based Artist Roisin McGuigan opened an art exhibition in the prestigious Paul Kane gallery on Thursday, April 26th at 6:00 p.m. to rave reviews and brisk sales.

Titled Pentimenti, an art term that refers to an underlying image in a painting, such as an earlier painting or original draft that shows through, usually when the top layer of paint has become transparent with age, the exhibition runs until Saturday 19th of May.

As Roisin explains, "the title of this exhibition refers to the process of the work; a process which involved time spent thinking and rethinking, of changing and revising, all the while being conscious of the need to allow the painting to be self defining, dictated, not by me as an artist, but by each painting's individual properties. The work, therefore, continually changes and each work concludes according to its own logical and pictorial need."

Roisin's interest in the process of painting led her to learn fresco, a process entirely dependent on the materials used and their particular application. She studied at the NCAD, earning a Bachelor of Arts in the history of art and fine art. "Studies in Art History describe how artists changed their mind while painting, altering certain parts entirely. These alterations, particularly with fresco works, are revealed only by the ageing and fading of the work through time allowing the ghosts of the original painting, the pentimenti, to show through from underneath."

The frescoes included in this exhibition, however, do not refer to the art historic context of fresco paintings and their religious and political arenas but, rather, to the specifics of fresco as a painting technique. They are an experiment with the particularly complex processes of layering, image mapping and painting; processes that are also integral to the development of each oil painting yet, for all that, are processes that return a complexity of differing images.

While trees, the key subject in Roisin's paintings for the past few years, remain the pictorial subject of the works in the exhibition, the process of both the paintings in oil and fresco becomes as important, if not more so, than the subject. These, then, are paintings about trees, which undoubtedly reference the landscape, yet also are paintings about painting.

For more information please log onto www.thepaulkanegallery.com or call 087 647 8423. The Paul Kane Gallery is located in 6 Merrion Square in Dublin 2.