Colin Darke
The Capital Painting

Preview: Friday, January 11th 6-8pm
Exhibition continues until February 16th 2008

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios’ first exhibition of the New Year is a solo show by Derry based artist Colin Darke. The Capital Paintings, best described as a painting installation, comprises 480 individual pieces each painted on a standard A4 size canvas uniformly hung and covering the entire wall space of Temple Bar Gallery. Collectively, these pieces form a single significant body of work, the result of a methodical and painstaking process carried out by the artist over a period of four years. Colin Darke is well known as a conceptual artist both in and outside Ireland. This is his first solo exhibition in the Republic of Ireland.

The Capital Paintings has evolved from an earlier project by Darke (titled Capital) where, also over an extended period, he transcribed by hand the entire three volumes of Karl Marx’s ‘Das Capital’ onto 480 two dimensional objects randomly selected but mostly identifiable as items deriving from commercial or industrial production. All objects selected and overwritten were plastic laminated and presented in grid format. While rewriting the text, and inevitably absorbing large tracts of it, he became specifically interested in Marx’s “division of commodity and production into two ‘departments’ – production of the means of production and production of the means of consumption”. From this it became clear to him that his own project effectively combined the two, the result appearing as an amalgam of traditional art production and Duchampian readymade.

With The Capital Paintings, Darke has removed the fine gauze of text, this time intensely reconsidering every item of the earlier work but now rendering it in the most traditional of all media oil and canvas. In releasing each item from its laminate and ‘re presenting’ it in paint, Darke flips the previous process, the ready made becomes the ‘unique‘ art object, the banal commodity further commodified and rarified via its display in the gallery context. Marx’s magnum opus may not be so apparent but it is there as an essential referent; presented en mass the ephemera may act as a reminder of the extent to which our daily lives are overwhelmed by the detritus of consumerism. Alternatively, the work may be read as a questioning of the uneasy but necessarily interdependent relationship between creativity and consumerism.

Curiously, while the presentation of the Capital Paintings as a seemingly endless production line, intentionally belies the intellectual conceit involved in its making, quite often it is the seductive quality of paint (combined with Darke’s observational prowess) that has the effect of elevating the most mundane of objects; an air freshener, a balloon, a playing card, a comic cover transformed by the love, care and attention that reveals a consistent aesthetic. Interestingly this was a ‘by product’ unforeseen by the artist at the outset of the project: ‘My first consideration’ says Darke ‘has been the use value and exchange value of art, with notions of beauty an irrelevance to me. Making so many paintings has now forced me into thinking of the aesthetic value of my work. This may alter my approach to art production in the future.’

Colin Darke has exhibited widely in Northern Ireland , Europe and North America, Recent solo shows include Capital at the Context Gallery Derry 2005. In 2003 he was part of the Venice Bienale 50 curated by Franceso Bonami for the Arsenale in Venice. In March of 2008 he will present the Commodity Form a two person show with David Mabb at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast

Press Contact: Claire Power - Temple Bar Gallery & Studios - t. + 353 1 671 0073 - e. press@templebargallery.com