A painting may be an accumulation of material facts but is also imbued with more intangible things from the practical circumstances of its making, to the invisible realm of the artist’s thoughts and emotions or the power or meaning it takes on for eventual viewers and so there is an invitation within each work to pause or journey onwards.

– Patrick Michael Fitzgerald

Port of call

“An exhibition is a port of call, one of the stages on life’s way, to echo Soren Kierkegaard, and a painting is an accumulation of material facts. But like most things in life, it is always much more than that. It is also a whole manner of things we cannot see; the spirit in which it was made, the circumstances of daily life from which it comes forth, the invisible realm of our thoughts and emotions and above all the event itself of the viewer recreating the work with his or her own gaze and life experience. I think it would be true to say, that in today’s world especially, we are adrift, ungrounded, we no longer have a Jacobs’s ladder to give meaning to our endeavours. Herein lies one of painting’s raison d’être, as a point of existential orientation, a means of making sense of our surroundings, our experience and who we might be or become. The word poetry is from the Greek poiein which means quite literally “to make”. So painting is perhaps closer to poetry than anything else. It reveals itself in the making, in the event of its own production, in the almost infinite variables that come into play. It is ancient and new at the same time, historically bound. It is medium specific, untranslatable, reinvented in each instance and presentation, and yet, I cannot escape from myself or my sensibility, this stuff of my being feeds into my work in the way my body determines the nature of a line or the choice of colour, how liquid or dense it might be, how the paint as material is manipulated, if I like something or not and how forms are defined or not. In the end, I always arrive at the edge of a painting and realise just how important it is, even though it is a vulnerable demarcation and can be questioned; can the painting extend onto the wall itself? Is a painting an object that is lost in itself? A fundamental contradiction that is necessary for the painting to exist?”

– Patrick Michael Fitzgerald July 2024