LENNON: MATTER TO MIND
Lennon was born in 1947. The Irish Museum or Modern Art in Dublin currently presents a solo show of Lennon’s work (till 30 September 2018). Lennon lives and works in Dublin.
Lennon`s art, Porous Plane, begun in the 1970s with Folded/ Unrolled paintings, has continued to create innovative forms of painting, e.g. the Autochthones: The aluminium block when it is rubbed by hand using abrasive paper and a liquid binder together, makes a viscous pigment appear from within the surface creating its own paint from the element of the block itself.
In the Summer of 1959 Lennon saw a photograph in a book of a pile of spectacles in a German Concentration Camp. This picture stopped him in a way that was new lo him and he kept going back to see if what he thought he saw was really there. “l had great sympathy for people who wore glasses and especially children with ill-fitting or cheap wire rimmed ones: they had an air of vulnerability about them – and there was a mound of them … taken away from them, but for what?” That for what reson became the background against which he took a position: a basis from which to take ethical and aesthetic decisions form
“I understood that ethics and aesthetics were the same, that it was a cultural problem that was behind the creation of Nazism and the Fascist way of seeing. It was no longer possible for me to continue the tradition of Western painting after the Holocaust”.
“When I unstretched that drum-taut canvas I saved the ground for painting and gained a material with unique qualities of its own. From material, then mind and gained a material with unique qualities of its own. From material, then mind the duality of mind over matter no longer applied”.
Nadine Schneider, Director Forum SchlossPlatz, CH – AARAU. ‘NachtBilder: The Last Swiss Holocaust Survivors’, March 16th-May 12th 2018.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER
Though the great song return no more
There’s keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.
W B. Yeats
Thoughts Form | 2013-2014 (PDF)
Essay for Pallant House Gallery
Interview with Dr. Emily Mark Fitzgerald
The Waking State by Dorthe Rugaard Jørgensen
On Art and Books: An Alphabet by Vickey Mahaffey
Art of the Possible by Vickey Mahaffey
Body Fold Light by Alison Ainley
—————
* New