Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin 2017
Copying from the Old Masters was, for hundreds of years, and still is for many people, part of a painters apprenticeship. In Remnants, Stephen Lawlor takes on that idea with a twist. He looks to works by three great Venetian painters: Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, and makes not direct copies but reworkings or variations on sections of, or complete, compositions. He has done this before, albeit in a more conscious, conceptualized way, trying out various approaches to dealing with a pre-existing, underlying image. With this new body of work, he is much more relaxed about the process and perhaps less bothered with symbolism.
He is a restless, exploratory artist. He came to painting by way of printmaking and has shown a willingness to present himself with new challenges, stretching and developing his use of the medium. Along the way, he has discovered that he loves paint, especially oil paint, and is enraptured by it's potential.
In Remnants, while the paintings are non-representational, they pursue a lively dialogue with their sources in terms of composition and chiaroscuro. Is there a subtext here about the risk of losing touch with a wealth of cultural heritage? Looking at two ambitious works, Canopy and Orpheus and Eurydice, certainly, there could be, particularly given our current age of anxiety. The overall implication is one of renewal and regeneration: there are always new things to see in great paintings.
-Aidan Dunne, Irish Times, April 2017