Milan,
Richard Hearns was born in 1980 in Beirut (Lebanon) and grew up in Ireland; The landscapes of both countries and those different cultures are very present in his paintings. He studied at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin, and later at its National College of Art and Design, and soon gave evidence of his talent for observation and drawing; Since then he has worked in a wide variety of media, oil painting standing out among them, and in recent years, compared to the linear meticulousness of his first production, he has turned towards abstraction, completely new to him and a challenge.
The Milanese Cadogan Gallery (which opened its doors in the spring of 2023, expanding the activity of its headquarters in London) has been promoting in its exhibitions the dissemination of the work of artists in their mid-career stage and those from developing countries , and offers this author the exhibition “The Living Mountain” until next July, which has a set of recent works inspired by the nature of those countries in which Hearns has resided, from a poetic perspective, and in the concept of genius locithat spirit that protects homes, lands and its inhabitants and that, coming from Roman mythology, has been linked since the beginning of the last century, not so much to a deity, but to the idiosyncrasy and beliefs of each people, to the culture and traditions specific to a specific community.
The canvases gathered in Milan draw, in particular, from the calmness and sense of welcome that Hearns found in the rugged landscapes of the Burren National Park, in the Irish county of Clare, where he lived for some time; also of the resonances that he glimpses in them from his native Lebanon: he compares the unique identity of the Irish and their habitual historical migrations outside their country to a past of the Lebanese population equally marked by voyages destined for exploration and trade.
The title of this exhibition, “The Living Mountain”, comes from one of the large-format pieces on display: a landscape structured in five large canvases that he raised as a tribute to Mount Turlough, in County Wicklow; His name in Irish could be translated as disappearing lake. The writer Niall Williams wrote about this work, moved: They are not gray or impassive paintings; They are overflowing. First they hit us with their energy, urgency and color, and when we contemplate them more slowly, they suggest tenderness and delicacy. If you sit before these five large paintings, you feel that the mountain comes to life. You feel their difference and their individuality, their strangeness and their beauty. These are not representations in an ordinary sense, but in an extraordinary one: the mountain represented, represented again, differently, with all its contradictory, mysterious character and, ultimately, remade through the hand and spirit of a notable artist. She is alive. And like all living beings, the more you look at it, the more you really see it.
What we find in that project, and in the rest of the oil paintings in Cadogan, are personal (and idyllic) projections of real landscapes, rendered abstract through an almost expressionist use of color: we are talking about impressions of the real, sifted by the filter of experience and memory, in which Hearns does not hide, but seeks to maintain, the traces of his physical work; the expansion of certain strokes coincides with the length of his arm and, on occasions, when he has resorted to significant sizes, the height of the supports has corresponded to his own. Furthermore, the intensity of his palette has to do with that with which he experiences nature and in some marks, raw and indecipherable, a personal language based on undulations and rhythms can be intuited.
It is easy to remember these canvases of Franz Kline for the boldness of his gestures and of Rothko for the blurring of the borders between his color fields, but surely the fundamental aesthetic reference of many Hearns pieces are the paintings that Willem de Kooning made out in the fifties and sixties.
Richard Hearns. “The Living Mountain”
CADOGAN GALLERY
Via Bramante 5
Milan
From May 14 to July 27, 2024
