Imagine trying to represent the stars; and imagine what it must require of someone to believe that it is it possible to construct simple objects that will make a connection with heavenly bodies separated from them by on other local distances. Although the roots of such an enterprise might be grounded with a recognisable area of artistic practice, the notion that Dermot O’Brien is enacting the saying reach for the stars is irresistible: he has after all chased rainbows , attempted to recreate the effect of such phenomena at will and within designated spaces.
Both these sayings imply a certain innocence, and this is crucial to O’Brien’s work – a hard one in a sense that is able to maintain a belief in the potential of things to be transformed à la conviction that this transformation can be demonstrated. Implicit in this is a strange relation between the rationale and the miraculous, and awareness of the wonderment that certain things are able to inspire linked with the desire to know how this happens in order that it might be replicated.
Whether O’Brien succeeds all fails in these attempts at the impossible, the process he goes through emulates explores one of the most poignant questions about art: how it is possible to something to evade its own nature? Certainly it is in the nature of art to perform this evasion, but the way in which it happens is mysterious – the attempt to understand conjures its own magic.
JUAN CRUZ
Light and it’s obliteration or eclipse; the transformation of a light source into a sculptural object by the negation of its normal function.
This is painting without paint: intelligence, poetic and sexy.
SARAH KENT, TIME OUT
Jeniffer Higgie, Frieze Magazine- Issue 32
John Winsor, Independent on Saturday