Patrick O'Donnell

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Arc, angle, plane, form

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Patrick's current practice explores themes of emotional architecture, memory and the poetics of space.  Focusing on the formal elements of edges/shapes/tone, the current visual language has developed from a visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2016 where the Holocaust Tower made a deep impression - a dank, claustrophobic and light-deprived space.  Acute wall planes shooting up to a slither of light and freedom. A charcoal tower.  The exposure to this place resonated with his spending extended periods of time in hospital with parents confined to a solitary room, trying to empathise and wondering how he could pass the time by making pleasing compositions from the corner junctions, if he were to be confined to a similar space.

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This accumulated experience prompted a period of re-considering Patrick's approach, stripping back the use of colour and working in charcoals, developing austere and sombre compositions in response to his experience of public and domestic environments where an emotional connection was felt.

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There is a nod to Modernist 2D graphic concerns and the paired down non-objective work of the Suprematists with the exploration of shapes and composition - art as pure feeling, and although there is a connection to "a sense of place" in Patrick's work, the shapes and compositions have developed a vocabulary entirely distinct from the original inspirations.

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The mixed media paintings here, with the exception of the Fifth and Sixth Love Paintings that refer to David Hockney's series from the 1960's, have evolved from compositions developed from various corners of spatial transitions within poignant domestic environs.  Both influences inform Patrick's continued quest of attempting to make experience and memories pictorially tangible through the investigation of two- dimensional space and three-dimensional form, hovering somewhere between the two.