Róisín Ní Neachtain

Shudder is a kind of premonition of subjectivity, a sense of being touched by the other… without shudder consciousness is trapped in reification… The subject is lifeless except when it is able to shudder in response to the total spell.

—Theodor W. Adorno

One sees, in Róisín Ní Neachtain’s pictures, the same image over and over. An ordinary object — the human figure, precariously set in space. The body is distorted in the naive thickness of paint to suggest the internal appearance of a grotesque mutilation. We stand claustrophobically close to the figures — they often threaten to impinge upon us, to erupt as though determined to impress their presence upon our consciousness. The vigorous, often slashing strokes, liberate the turbulent intensity and intuitive power of seemingly uncontrollable but highly descriptive gestures. A balance, or perhaps a dissonance, like that created by the harmoniously orchestrated melody over which looms a shrill tone, dissonant, spontaneous, and deafening. 

At their best, Neachtain’s paintings register the autonomy of the artwork without a complete rupture from its deadening effect — into the theatricality of helpless expression. Each stroke resists the spell of totality by containing the possibility of a more expansive, joyful spontaneity, tempered by the requisites of the object. Her dissolute portraits do not mistake expression as an aspect of subjectivity, but rather showcase an externalized view of the relation between subject and object. In their “dreamlike” nature, which recalls the style of Soutine or Giacometti, metaphors of desire (violence, perhaps also of longing) are objectified through the naive directness of seeing, over which psychological visions lurk. But whether the contradiction of terror and passion can find expression, as has been a repeated desire since the late 19th century, is not a question of psychology but of form — of whether color and shape can become, in Cézanne’s words, “the place where our brain and the universe meet.” “Poetry comes into the picture spontaneously. When it is dragged in it becomes literature.”

—Gabriel Almeida