“The American cultural historian Richard Sennett put forward the idea that something fundamental has happened to our sense of space, especially of urban space. Because we now move at speed, he argues, we have stopped paying attention to public spaces for their own sake and have made them ‘a means to the end of pure emotion – we now measure urban spaces in terms of how easy it is to drive through them…The driver wants to go through the space, not to be aroused by it.’ Driving becomes more and more like watching television: ‘Thus the new geography re-inforces the mass media. The traveller, like the television viewer, experiences the world in narcotic terms; the body moves passively, desensitized in space, to destinations set in a fragmented and discontinuous urban geography.’This could be a description of many of Oliver Comerford’s paintings. They are images of transition that never form anything so continuous and coherent as a journey. They take us through places that are at once real and insubstantial, that loom in the light and dissolve in the shadows, places where definitions blur and boarders between one thing and another seem always on the point of being washed away.”
Fintan O’Toole, Out of Here, (2010)