Fergal Stapleton

The small paintings in the exhibition are from an ongoing series of vanitas that Stapleton began several years ago. At first they were more like quotations from Old Master painting – over-looked details and fragments. A few were painted as studio still lives. But over time as they have evolved they have transcended their attachment to historical and physical reality. They have become something in themselves, existing on the threshold of reality with their own material logic. The just-here flowers hover and float, petals fall, and their partnering orbs (perhaps glass, perhaps filled with water) reflect hesitant glimmers of light.

The larger paintings are fuller more expansive celebrations of the same anti-gestalt: a mass of uncertain features cohering into unstable versions of human faces, clothing, action, with highlights tending to resolve into peculiar jewels and baubles, each ‘scene’ situated in shadowy rooms (or are they simply atmospheres?) of indecipherable depth.

All these effects – the depth, the surface, the creation of a layered reality just beyond us that we peer into, the light, the refractions – are produced by oil. The methods are as old as those used in the Renaissance, the various techniques brought to their zenith by the Flemish masters. In Stapleton’s paintings these techniques and mediums have been resurrected, but in a way where medium and content defy separate analysis and become a single, unified field.

Fergal Stapleton (b. 1961) lives and works in London. Recent group exhibitions include: In der Wohnung at the Gerbert Foundation, Switzerland; with solo presentations at Carl Freedman Gallery and V22, London. Lo Ceremonial is the artist’s sixth presentation at the Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied with She Who By Dancing, a short story written by the artist and illustrated with paintings from the exhibition.