Liam Ryan

I moved to Berlin this Autumn. Prior to the move, I had been living in the UK for thirteen years.

For the past four years, I have been making black on black and silver paintings. One of these is featured here. The paintings are dark. As Max Ernst once said, “if you live in revolting times, you should make revolting Art.”; He said something like that once anyway.. I really shouldn’t use quotation marks.

Generally the text in the dark paintings is painted backwards and my intention was that the paintings would address the viewer as mirrors...A friend reflected on these works in an eloquent way, beyond my capability:

“Painting black on black, Liam Ryan invites the viewer to peer through a glass darkly. As in a mirror, referenced images appear reversed, though darkness obscures them. This encourages the viewer to actively engage with the paintings, to recover what there is to be seen. Even should the attempt to recover the referenced images prove impossible, the viewer enjoys formal features of the image perhaps otherwise obscured by the light of day, their play with negative spaces and the fine grain of texture of the painting itself. The paintings are thus an absurd mirror, rendering the visible invisible, and the invisible, visible.”

- Prof Mark Eli Kalderon

Born in Mallow in 1982, Liam studied in NCAD, Dublin, before rellocating to London.

Guaranteed Forever, Watercolour, 60x45cm (2020)

The featured painting Guaranteed Forever is a new work, a watercolour and it marks my return to colour, being re-energiszd with a new start in Berlin and new hope.

The other two paintings in colour, featured in the group, are earlier works - painted in London too. I was looking for a way to make new surreal paintings and the works were composed in a paripaitetic, loose manner. Titles were garnered from a cut up technique.

Angel of Yesterday’s Forgotten Promise, oil on linen 25cm x 25cm

British Brain Washing Corp, oil on linen 150cm x 120cm (2018)

Koumpoiunaphobia, oil in linen 55 x 45cm (2016)