Aleph Contemporary

Liam O'Connor is a writer and critic whose work focuses on providing analytical readings of contemporary painting, often connecting formal aspects of the work—such as composition, material handling, and surface texture—with broader philosophical and socio-economic contexts.

Text for Aleph Contemporary: Hope among the Cynicism

For Aleph Contemporary's online exhibition Gordon Dalton: Birdhouse Blues (May 2020), Liam O'Connor contributed a thoughtful introductory text titled "Hope among the cynicism." The essay offers a detailed engagement with the exhibition's central painting and provides a framework for understanding Dalton's overall practice.

Key Themes in O'Connor's Analysis:

• The Breakdown of Landscape: O'Connor approaches Birdhouse Blues by noting the initial 'tropes of landscape painting' (trees, outbuildings) but immediately observes how the painting "claps back," resisting traditional interpretation. He highlights how distance is shortened and space "breaks down into a mix of abstracted shapes," creating a unified and "maximalist" painted plane that is almost "overbearing" with information.

• Memory and Mutation: The text underscores the autobiographical roots of Dalton's work, noting the specific reference to the abandoned birdhouses at the Buenos Aires Zoo. O'Connor stresses that these real-life places and objects are "liable to mutate as the painting is created." The work becomes an "abstract painting constructed from memory," where elements mutate into forms that can simply "handle paint."

• The Painter's Struggle: O'Connor draws a lineage between Dalton and artists like Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Walter Sickert, and Edvard Munch. However, the "visceral" link is the shared sense of struggle and grappling. He observes Dalton's earlier work was overtly "cynical of the art world," but notes that the later work, including Birdhouse Blues, shifts this cynicism inward, showing an artist "fighting to articulate something" and struggling against self-doubt and the history of painting itself.

• Materiality and Authenticity: The text emphasises the physical, fallible quality of the paint: it is "smeared, removed, scrubbed and pushed into the grain of the canvas." This application articulates the subject—the inadequacy of memory and the melancholic nature of the half-remembered place—authentically revealing the painter's process.

O'Connor's essay successfully moves beyond a simple description of the painting to position Gordon Dalton's work within a tradition of deeply felt, process-led painting, where the "slow brawl" of creation is precisely where the aesthetic value and honesty of the work resides.