10 July - 8 August 1999
Paul Finnegan's work has often been talked of in terms of a 'transmutation', 'hallucinatory' and 'phantasmic'. The last few years has seen a dismembering of constituent parts of (un)recognisable anatomy and the agglutination of them into organic deviants. A denaturing almost of the human form, or just form itself. His work has fitted seemingly under a branching of the supernatural, in that realm it managed to strike a chord with fears of genetic mismanagement. Not that the work could be thought of in exclusively repellent terms, most held the gaze with an unusual seductiveness. They were strange and difficult to think of in terms of their medium, but that's the way they were.
In a series of new works Finnegan cleaves more obviously and more recognisably into a salient tradition. In the form of solidified Rorschach blots he presents four paintings cast from clay, each has been produced through sandwiching the wet material and casting the riffled, separated surfaces. Like unchartered terrains drawn from the same substance; not depictions of landscapes, but landscapes themselves. Alongside these is a painting made up through the deception of a simple mirror trick, conflating illusion and sleight of hand in a felicitous context. The relocation of matter into these new works, is like the difference between knowing what temperature water boils at knowing your name.
