Helen O’Leary “Delicate Negotiations”

Lesley Heller Workspace

poster for Helen O’Leary “Delicate Negotiations”

This event has ended.

“The end of art is peace / could be the motto of this frail device,” writes Seamus Heaney in The Harvest Bow, but it is an end that is rarely, if ever, easily attained. In between the identified need and the desired end is a process of some turbulence and disorder, wherein the claims of fracture and disappointment must be accounted for.

Helen O’Leary’s new work understands the play between a unifying scheme of resolution and its opposite: how art is to be wrestled from difficulty and contest, and may still cohere on a surface that is given to peace as much as to beauty.

Helen O’Leary’s art draws on her Irish background, and explores with deftness, rigor and craft, the idea of origin, of how everything we subsequently become has been framed by the visual, cultural, moral and emotional lines of definition that are drawn around our formative childhood worlds. In these surfaces, one sees the shadow remnants of ploughed fields and scrubbed wooden tables, of the straight lines of rural conversation and tidy timetables, of the ongoing poetry of season and tide, pattern and ritual.

The beauty of the work is indisputable, but these are paintings which also benefit from considerable intellectual ballast and emotional resonance. As well as their obvious awareness of the painterly tradition, the depth of Helen’s engagement with literature and, in particular, with poetry, is markedly visible in these paintings: Beckett’s restraint, Heaney’s lyricism, Rimbaud’s visionary luminescence, and Chekov’s way of structuring narrative all contribute to the forceful and yet elegant articulation of her work.

There is resolution here, certainly, but it is neither glib nor occasional. What O’Leary offers within her frames are meditative spaces that do not renege on the disarmingly messy business of life, but instead suggest ways in which this might be resolved into moments of intense feeling and deliberate art. As a craftsperson and technician, there is real achievement here: the handling of color, shape and texture reminds us that O’Leary is a painter of profound and noted skill; she is also an artist of sensitivity and range. These are not surfaces easily come by and in their delicate negotiations, they declare a stay on discord and friction, offering to us instead this most accomplished peace. Vona Groarke

Media

Schedule

from September 09, 2015 to October 18, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-09-09 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Helen O’Leary

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use