Kevin Kavanagh is pleased to present In a certain light, an exhibition of new paintings by Diana Copperwhite.The exhibition opens on Friday 9th June and runs until Friday 7th of July, reception Tuesday 13th of June at 6.30pm.
The title of Diana Copperwhite’s latest exhibition, In a certain light, invites multiple but ambiguous readings. To be certain is to be without doubt, but Copperwhite’s title suggests otherwise. Certainty, it would seem is not inevitable. To complicate things further, things are not always what they seem. Light for instance may be invisible to the human eye, but reveals itself to be full of colour when refracted and dispersed through a prism. “Reality”, as Einstein has said, “is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” This ambiguity is the stuff of Copperwhite’s paintings. Whether painting from sources that are deeply personal to the artist or images from mass media, Copperwhite’s paintings relate strongly to memory.
The dreamlike quality to Copperwhite’s work is not only achieved by her choice of imagery but is very much tied in with the physical act of painting itself. Copperwhite claims that the first painted layer is never strong enough; images get painted over, she changes her mind and gradually a history builds up. For the painting to emerge she must be willing to destroy what she already has. With this repeated working over of the surface, layers are sometimes obliterated by the next, depending on the thickness of oil paint. How we see, how we remember and how we know, are the themes which weave through her work - her paintings revealing a glimpse of a parallel universe balanced between the remembered and real, the abstract and representational.
- Jacqui McIntosh, 2006
A catalogue with an essay by Jacqui McIntosh has been published for the exhibition.
