From Contrapposto:

There is something visceral about Oliver Comerford’s painting. The colours verge on super-saturation, which adds to their hyper-real edge. And his paintings are edgy – they focus on dark, roadside places, with a finish that owes its origins to photo-realism but stops short of the full trompe l’oeil that might distract from the concept by wowing with painterly skill. Comerford can paint, but his work isn’t showy. It’s insistent in a solid, self-possessed way. His use of hard surfaces: oil on canvas on board, gives them another hard edge. His people-less vistas place the viewer in the narratives they suggest: we observe, we scan the horizon, we look for clues. There’s a crime-scene quality to some, to the rest, a feeling that we are glimpsing an eerie, slightly off-kilter world, running parallel to our own.  By first photographing and then painting real places, Comerford gives familiar landscapes back to us transformed, at once more mysterious and more ordinary than reality. The importance of his RHA show, earlier this year, lay not just in the commendable achievement of borrowing a comprehensive catalogue of works back from collectors to show en mass, but in the opportunity it afforded to trace Comerford’s progress. Earlier works hung alongside recent paintings, revealing not just a consistent, focused determination, from 1994 to 2010, but what has been learnt along the way.

Writer and lecturer Harry Browne, Irish Times Arts Editor Shane Hegarty and I discuss Oliver Comerford’s RHA show with John Kelly on RTE Television’s The View on 27 April 2010: http://www.rte.ie/tv/theview/archive/20100427.html

(The other items discussed on the show are: Todd Solondz’s film Life During Wartime, The Birthday of the Infanta at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre and Hugh Hamilton’s novel Hand In The Fire)

This post first appeared on Contrapposto

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