Darragh Kennedy is a visual artist based in Co. Cork with a BA in Fine Art Painting from Limerick School of Art and Design. Their work responds to ideas of lost Modern optimism, generating imagined landscapes wherein tensions between contemporary acceleration contrasts painted studies as a form of deceleration.
Recurrent subjects of novelty handmade objects such as paper planes and fortune tellers illustrate the human-made built with humour, tactility and attentiveness. Illusionary qualities of painted paper then appear as subjects of discard and detachment suggesting a contemporary divorce from this material intimacy as well as an intent to glean such leftovers through image-making.
They employ diagram style compositions, lending a sense of modern rationale and organisation to painted materiality, allowing an exchange between logical symbols and material sensitivity in oil paint. Their use of perspectival drawing and architectural features extends the attention of these studies to a spatial logic, forming a relation between care and the built urban environment.
This investigation is driven by an exploration of 20th century optimism in Modern architecture, a period wherein material forms in the urban were closely related to ideals of social betterment. Kennedy aims to explore the potential of paintings flatness and the inverse depth of their image as substitutes for access and obstruction in public space. Through this relation, spatial apparition and horizon lines act as optimistic manoeuvres seeking to recreate flatness to openness, contrast contemporary proliferation of genericity and obstruction in urbanity, and allow the horizon line to be maintained as a symbol of futurity.
