The Molesworth Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings by Francis Matthews.

In this latest body of work, followers of the artist will recognise the familiar subject matter of urban architecture: details of streets and buildings that might otherwise go unnoticed or be cursorily dismissed as unworthy of representation due to a drab or discordant appearance. For Matthews, however, these mundane elements of the urban landscape are ripe with possibilities, energized by the sophisticated interplay of light and shadow.

Francis Matthews graduated with a first-class honours degree in architecture from UCD before pursuing a career as an artist. He has won multiple awards, including the Hennessy Craig Scholarship at the RHA Annual.

We’re publishing a hardback book to accompany the show. The introductory text by Dr Ellen Rowley can be read below.

_________

Almost blacker than black:

Francis Mathews and the uncanny art of total balance and almost blackness

by Dr Ellen Rowley

So, I’m standing in the artist’s kitchen. His kitchen is the rear room of the house: a two-storey city cottage, at the end of a terrace which feeds directly to a busy road. There’s barely a path, or so it feels, between the artist’s house and his neighbourhood, in transit. His cottage is built into a hill. Beside it is an industrial lot – selling plumbing wares. Out front, across the busy road and up aways, there is another hill, built in layers. And maybe, because it’s a rainy windblown day, the artist’s house is prevailed upon by all of this. It is in a valley of wet, greyish sandwich-board city.