Green On Red Gallery is very proud to announce Fictional Fictions, a solo exhibition of John Cronin’s new oil paintings which continue the grapple with AI, truth and fiction.

He says:

“These are my Alt Genre Paintings, mechanical, gestural and  organic celebrations and abuses of paint.  Morphing, pathologising, and destructive elements seek out and illuminate what has gone before.

Elements break down, both compositionally and in their very materiality – once-luscious oil paint is cracked, dried and exhausted and vies with free-flowing organic rivers and mists of paint, at the same time revealing the scar-tissue which is the underpainting. These paintings are chaotic and confusing reflecting our technological age of non-linear warfare and algorithms.  They are echo chambers of narratives drifting farther from the truth, a truth that has not been forgotten, just outvoted.   FICTIONAL FICTION.”
John Cronin, 2026

John Cronin is one of Ireland’s leading and most established painters. He has been exhibiting in Ireland and internationally since the late 1980s.

His ZXX ( 2016 ) paintings were as much a metaphor for the hidden, untranslatable layers of his often monumental abstract oil on aluminium paintings as they were a comment on our new open-source world.   ZXX was the title of his large solo RHA exhibition in 2016.  His Standard Deviation ( 2013 ) 122 x 549cm triptych was featured in the RHA’s In And Of Itself – Abstraction in the Age of Images ( 2022 ) survey exhibition of Irish abstraction, curated by Patrick Murphy.
While his work’s primary concern is abstract painting in the age of artificial intelligence, the titles of his exhibitions often reflect a desire to add a thematic twist to each new body of work. Through a diverse range of exhibitions, including Standard Deviation, Augmented Reality,  MHz,  ZXX up to Artificial Bee Colony in 2024, we have seen him continually extend the language of his practice.

Cronin has gleaned praise from many quarters most notably from the eminent New York Art Critic Donald Kuspit, who says Cronin ‘ puts the “juice” back into modernist painting, after Greenberg’s post-painterly theory squeezed it out. ’

“Modernist Painting Redivivus – John Cronin’s Abstractions” :  Donald Kuspit in Palinode, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, 2005.