Port of Call

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald
On view July 20th - August 31st

Opening Reception: Saturday July 20th 2024, 4pm-6pm.

College Lane Gallery, Abbey Street, Howth, County Dublin D13 EY23, Ireland.
DM on @college_lane_gallery 

A port of call is not necessarily part of a ship’s itinerary. It can be an unexpected, intermediate stopover, to stock up on supplies, repairs, change of crew or even an emergency situation. An exhibition, for me, is a port of call of sorts, an intermediate place where things are rearranged and contemplated afresh in an unfamiliar context. In my case, there is no final destination in a linear sense, everything circles in an ongoing activity of discovery, and each port of call is like one of the stages on life’s way to echo Soren Kierkegaard.

A painting is an accumulation of material facts. But like most things in life, it is always much more than that. It is also a whole manner of things we cannot see; the spirit in which it was made, the circumstances of daily life from which it came forth, the invisible realm of our thoughts and emotions and above all the event itself of the viewer recreating the work with his or her own gaze and life experience. I think it would be true to say, that in today’s world especially, we are adrift, ungrounded, we no longer have a Jacobs’s ladder to give meaning to our endeavours. Herein lies one of painting’s raison d'être; as a point of existential orientation, a means of making sense of our surroundings, our experience and who we might be or become. The word poetry is from the Greek poiein which means quite literally “to make”. So painting is perhaps closer to poetry than anything else. It reveals itself in the making, in the event of its own production, in the almost infinite variables that come into play. It is ancient and new at the same time, historically bound. It is medium specific, untranslatable, reinvented in each instance and presentation, and yet, I cannot escape from myself or my sensibility, this stuff of my being feeds into my work in the way my body determines the nature of a line or the choice of colour, how liquid or dense it might be, how the paint as material is manipulated, if I like something or not and how forms are defined or not. In the end, I always arrive at the edge of a painting and realise just how important it is, even though it is a vulnerable demarcation and can be questioned; can the painting extend onto the wall itself? Is a painting an object that is lost in itself? A fundamental contradiction that is necessary for the painting to exist?

© Patrick Michael Fitzgerald - June 2024

The College Lane Gallery and Studios are part of The Old College located in the mediaeval centre of Howth in Dublin. This was a place of congregation and learning from the late 15th to early 16th century and currently artists occupy studios at the rear and the innovative project space in front. The exhibition space developed in response to looming lockdowns in 2019 and since a range of exhibition formats emerged which can always be seen from within the local public space. Artists are invited to develop or exhibit in any way that represents their practice with an emphasis on process and experimentation.