Location: Abbeyleix Library

Date: Thursday June 10

Time: 6pm – Opening

“I feel so lost every minute of every day. But I must admit, I love it. The ambiguous nature of being human is one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever known. Terribly humbling and empowering all at once. It moves me deeply, at times to tears.”

Statement

Using the photograph as a reference point Brennan attempts to transform the photo’s deathly silence into painterly noise bestowing a sense of posthumous dignity on the image. Painting solely from his own collection of personal photographsBrennan attempts to convey some personal sense of humanity and existence: its fragility, its pathos, our anxiety, our joys, our love and our frustration.

While these images verge on the auto biographical they also can be generalised to the entire human race as the Latin poet Terrence expressed:

Homo sum , humani a me nil alienum puto -

I am man, and nothing human is foreign to me.

Brennan’s painting also addresses and questions the idea of beauty in modern painting. To date Brennan’s work has been driven by a desire to create beauty, but with no sacrifice of modern ugliness, to capture the tragic starkness of life that has reached a crescendo in modernity.

Brennan states that, “ it is not my desire to create nice, easy to look at images; if as many people dislike my work as like it then that creates dialog and that means I’ve done my job.” Brennan is attempting to create challenging images that use the power of painting to perhaps blur the distinction (if indeed there is one) between the beautiful and the ugly.

For Brennan, the expressive form is a way of thinking about subject matter. The mastery of his craft and the contemplation of form through subject matter is central to his developing practise. Brennan also takes inspiration from the writing of Donald Kuspit, who in his book the The End of Art wrote on “New Old Masters”:

Their art reaffirms visible reality with no sacrifice of its inner resonance. They make even the starkest appearances – and all appearances are oddly stark to the sensitive eye – pleasing with no sacrifice of their starkness. Their art is an unexpected gift in these dark postart times.

It is an alternative art, without the condescension that money, the media, and popular entertainment – and postart, which is their lackey – have to their audience. New Old Master art brings us a fresh sense of the purposefulness of art – faith in the possibility of making a new aesthetic harmony out of the tragedy of life, without falsifying it – and a new sense of art’s interhumanity.

Conor Brennan graduated from Limerick of Art and Design in 2009 and is currently living and working in Portlaoise.”