Donal Moloney

Text from Corner 7 gallery Press Release: ISLANDS is an exhibition of Donal Moloney’s absurdly intricate and poetically packed paintings, hung upon walls covered with the drawings of 120 primary school children. 

Donal Moloney’s paintings delight in their delicious detail. They are packed with luminous layers of colour, imagery, ideas, false turns, dead ends, shards of epiphany and aesthetic ramblings. A lifetime seems to have passed in the process of their creation, as the surface is repeatedly applied, concealed, and removed. What remains arrives as an apparition, as discarded thoughts move aside to let a ghostly image through.

The poetic and lyrical ancestry of Moloney’s work betrays his Irish roots, living as he does in rural southern Ireland, close to his hometown of Cork. He sites the literary works of Doireann Ní Ghríofa, James Joyce and Paul Lynch as inspiration, alongside the paintings of Frank Bowling, wall works by Richard Wright and Rachel Ruysch’s 17th century Forest Floor Still Life paintings. Many an artist is well read with a honed eye, but the best are indiscriminate magpies, impulsively harvesting anything that catches their attention. A shoddy printout of the car from Repo Man, a John Lewis advert ripped from a magazine, random objects from a Pinterest board of children’s craft making– all are image making fodder, collaged together into the iridescent surfaces of Moloney’s work where the rainbow repeatedly binds content. It soaks through all Moloney’s paintings, perhaps as a unifying strategy for the many contained parts within one frame, or perhaps there is a philosophy linked to weather, folklore, religion, contemporary culture, or perhaps the artist just really likes the way it looks and can’t stop.

The pace of the application of paint appears important. It is pondering yet purposeful in its placement. The paintings seem to include a fair amount of fiddling, but it seems to be enjoyable fiddling. The density of mark is joyously applied as orb like shapes hover on top, pinning the picture plane to the surface. There is little receding space. Instead, we look at a painting that could have been turned to face the floor, so all its contents fall against its surface, yet when it is turned back and placed upon a wall, all the contents remain pressed against the picture plane.  

On the occasion of Islands, Moloney, and Corner7 director Rose Davey, will run a series of workshops for year 2 pupils from nearby Brecknock and Torriano Primary Schools. Each class will take it in turn to draw their fantasy islands straight onto the walls of Corner7 in coloured crayon. Moloney’s paintings will then be hung upon the walls scattered with the drawings of 80 school children. Corner7 is also delighted to include the paintings of children from Dromleigh National School in County Cork, who made chance-based paintings with Moloney earlier this month. 

This experimental collaboration between artist, rural Irish School, and inner city British school, is at the heart of Corner7’s ethos, and since children are the artists we all aspire to be, we are thrilled for local kids to be inspired by Moloney’s work, and for us all to be inspired by them.

Moloney has created a large-scale drawing which will be divided into 100 smaller sections, each available as an individual work. The abstracted, gestural lines spring from his painted works, building on their sense of density and movement, with a minimal colour palette inspired by CMYK printing processes. The postal exhibition format will see the work scattered across a large geographical area, creating chance connections between recipients, and suggesting the poetic possibility that one day the large work could be reassembled.

Video documentation: https://youtu.be/zPAn7kJDGRU

Podcast interview: https://anchor.fm/outputgallery/episodes/Interview-with-Donal-Moloney-etj5im

Medium: Acrylic on wall

Size: 340cm x 230cm.

Year: 2019.

https://hospital-rooms.com/rosewood-online-exhibition

Medium: Acrylic on canvas.  

Size: 28cm x 36cm.  

Year: 2018.

Medium: Acrylic on canvas.  

Size: 32cm x 43cm.  

Year: 2015.