Anthony O’Carroll’s practice evokes the sensation of landscape painting. The usage of highly textured surfaces and conventional artist oil paints create a unique visual aesthetic that develops across a stressed surface creating a real materiality.

O’Carroll sates of his new body of work,

“Although imagined non-spaces, these works echo geological formations that have been achieved by means of a carefully tested process that has evolved over years of experimentation and research. These spaces have been highlighted by incisions and scratches; they are drawn into and allow imagery to be formed from within the surface of the work - pitted, trawled, scratched and cracked. These pictures show an emotional resonance. There is violence in their creation. Though they are created, deformed and punished, their beauty is achieved by this struggle. They are exposed and invite the viewer to see their scars, their individual making and thus their growth into being. In combination, these attributes inform the work with a sense of use and age that leaves behind the fossil like evidence of the artists touch. The thick over painting in oils on top of the raw surface forces the sense of an apology. A covering up of the original layer of the work, that is as if made better by the use of oil paints thus hiding its original skin.

Born from this approach is the meeting point of conventional and non conventional painting mediums. It is this interaction that informs me of the multiple meanings associated with the term Topologies - the study of connectedness between spaces”.