Gaussian Blur is an exhibition of recent paintings by David Smith, where the artist attempts to visualise the uncertainty and fluidity of past memory and present moment.

This new body of work reflects an internal picture of lived, remembered, and imagined experience. Influenced by zen, ink painting, abstraction, and photography, these are records of unfixed and fluid experience.  While the works usually take the form of landscape, the driving concept is the transient nature of the physical world and our slippery perceptions of it.  These paintings depict forms, figures and spaces on solid wood panels. They use the chemical qualities of oil washes to disrupt the image surface, giving them a quality of movement that is fragile and temporary.

These ideas appear through the dissolving qualities in the paint surface, the represented image shifts and begins to unfix itself. Strong visual memories of living in Hong Kong have anchored themselves in Smith’s mind and at the same time, much of those 11 years have now faded like a dream. The compression of living in tiny spaces, seeing the sun through layers of haze, the silver tinge on a blue sky, the visceral neon skyline, the perpetual energy and the lack of stars. These and countless other lived impressions form the basis of the work he made there and since his return to Ireland in 2016.

That period in Hong Kong, where oppressive greys and vivid neon sit side by side has deeply informed much of Smith’s feeling towards how we live with and without nature. Each painting looks for the animation, space, energy, and decay that vibrates beneath the world around us and our perception of it. Recently, Smith began to expand his work to include figures within hazy, indeterminate spaces.  His time in Hong Kong had begun to feel like a dream that had no basis in physical reality, prompting the paintings to have an ‘out of time and place’ feeling, where temporality and physicality are rendered uncertain due to an introspective view of the world.  This creates scenes where the subject, surroundings and as an extension, time itself seem to blur.

Known to many professional and amateur photographers, gaussian blur refers to the Photoshop* tool and the softening (and possibly distancing) effect it can create in images.

David Smith, from County Mayo and currently living and working in Sligo, works primarily in painting, but also lens-based and music works.  Recent solo shows include City-Haze at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, Greyscale at AJC Contemporary, Hong Kong, An Island Disappears at Custom House Gallery, Westport.  He has participated in the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.  His works have featured in numerous Manifest International Painting Annuals. He taught at the Savannah College of Art & Design in Hong Kong before returning to Ireland in 2016. His film Eó Mughna’s Lament screened at Cannes Short Film Festival. Alongside his studio practice, 2 new short films were released in 2023, Nemeton and Abhartach. He has just completed an artist’s residency at The Dock in Leitrim.

* Photoshop is an image editing computer programme.

davidsmith-studio.com • Instagram @daithismith • #gaussianblur