David Quinn is an artist living and working in Mayo. Quinn works in paint on canvas as well as experimental surfaces. His recent wall based works, gold, silver and black paint on drilled wooden boards comprised a contemplative tone poem of paintings set in a world of crystalline light and detachment.
Often with Quinn the point of departure is the porous interface between us and everything we feel that is not us. Light, land, water, flesh; all made of the same stuff – as we always knew it was, but never quite felt to be true.
Presenting a catalogue of quietly charged moments and events; each painting’s surface becomes an instrument of almost binary measurements. Value is noted and assigned literally point by point; fields of nodes drilled directly into the panels create woodblock-like surfaces which underpin the enclosed intimacies depicted. At times re-imagining art-historical tropes, meaning and pictorial significance is explored and delighted in. These are paintings as shifting substrates, accepting and activating the projections and values we as viewers assign, playing a little with our expectations while holding to the light the moment in question – which as ever, is at once familiar and unknowable.