My new solo exhibition “Situated” will open Friday evening at 7pm at The Courthouse in Kinvara, and will continue through Sunday, September 7.
As it is written in the press release:
Kinvara Area Visual Artists (KAVA) are pleased to present a new exhibition, Darryl Vance: Situated, opening Friday, August 29th, 2025 with a public reception from 7 to 9pm at The Courthouse in Kinvara, County Galway. The exhibition will open with remarks by artist and musician Cath Taylor and music by singer songwriter Mick Brown. The gallery will be open daily from 11am until 5pm through Sunday, September 7th.
In this new work, artist Darryl Vance continues his exploration of the transformative qualities of paint. Developing his process over the past eight years, Vance has arrived at works of increasing complexity, bold colour and uneasy coherence. Painting in oil on cardboard that has been repeatedly cut into ever shrinking rectangles, surface and the peculiarities of corrugation combine to form works that are part painting, part sculpture, part mosaic. In juxtaposing the classic modernism of Mondrian, Paul Klee and Frank Lloyd Wright with the aesthetics of funk and the handmade, his geometry is surprisingly warm, inviting and sensual. Each work appears initially comforting, yet on closer viewing subtle tensions emerge.
And then something happened.
Over the past few years, as he became settled in the village of Kinvara, Vance began to look at his place in it. “So many things came to mind. The land and the things on it – livestock, boats, buildings in all states of ruin, walls, hedges – compelled me to paint a sort of 'thank you’ note to it all.” he says.
The ongoing paintings from this period are a departure from the uneasy rectangular abstractions of his prior work, and instead use the vernacular of traditional painting to create wry and poignant interpretations of his experience as artist, citizen and blow-in.
Last year he came upon an idea for a different tool to paint with: rushes. "I’d learned to make Brigid’s crosses with them, and it got me thinking that they were an apt tool to use in painting about this place.” Vance would later find out they’re quite versatile, and depending on how many you use, the strokes can be broad as a broom or needle thin. He continues, “I use them to add paint and texture, making a subtle surface of marks and patterns that recall the ancient and the prehistoric.”
Combining those wild Irish weeds with the usual brushes and palette knives lets Vance continue the nervous energy of his geometric paintings. But this latest series depicts more familiar aspects of the region through the artist's idiosyncratic vision. A cow stands in a boat, a Flake bar in its back. A sunken boat creates a small bowl of calm water. A herd of painted rocks. A broken necklace.
“And then I head into more abstract works inspired by wells, portals and paths. But the subjects all seem to have a particular element in common: that something has happened to them.”
Together with painted cardboard sculptures - “house-shaped paintings” as Vance calls them - the exhibition's trio of simultaneous series embodies the work of an endlessly inquisitive creativity.
Now, having said all that, I cordially invite you to see the show.
