I Can / Can I?
on painting and potentiality

Michael Coleman
Sonia Shiel
Hanneline Visnes

Preview: Friday 8 Aug 2008 6-8pm
Exhibition continues until 9 August – 20 September

“There is in effect something that humans are and have to be…It is the simple fact of ones’ existence as possibility or potentiality” - Giorgio Agamben 1993

Temple Bar Gallery presents I can / can I? on painting and potentiality, a three person show featuring recent and new work by Michael Coleman, Sonia Shiel (both from Ireland) and Hanneline Visnes (born in Norway, now resident in Scotland). The title sums up the intent of the exhibition: to locate painting in the realm of possibility and to consider the necessity of interrogation and experiment if painting is to continue to evolve towards a place of limitless potential.

Potentiality as a concept has its roots in Aristotelian thought with the ‘potential’ of something preceding its actuality and defined in relation to its opposite. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has noted ‘to be potential means also to be in relation to one’s own incapacity’. As he elaborates, ‘beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality’. The challenge of the concept is how it poses the dilemma between whether one can or cannot. Between these two opposites is the space to doubt, to question the limitation (Can I? Perhaps I can) and by doing so to push a step further towards a new form, another possibility.

In the instance of this exhibition ‘potentiality’ functions both as the underlying theme and the connecting thread between three artists who are known primarily as painters and whose individual styles and practices are entirely separate and distinct. What they have in common is a shared interest in pushing the boundaries of painting, very often combining it with other methods and processes and, on occasion, turning the painted object into 'something else'.

Michael Coleman’s work resists straightforward categorization since his practice is so constantly in flux. His pre-disposition to innovation prompts him to paint incessantly and, while doing so, to make, destroy, re-work, re-make and re-invent. His art has been described as a ‘continuous process of ‘creation, destruction and rebirth’.
Increasingly, Sonia Shiel takes as her source archetypical romantic narratives, protagonists and plots, using superfluous effect as a strategy to amplify notions of pathos and appeal. Her assemblages of paint, sound, video and/or sculpture expose the processes and frustrations of creative expression. Laced with comic absurdity, Shiel’s works, in their urgency and reductive simplicity comment on the ultimate legacy and fragility of human endeavour.
Hanneline Visnes’ images are both seductive and intense; birds and animals emerge oddly and memorably alongside meticulously rendered jewels and precious objects. Her re-defining of these rarities in the abstracted context of both drawings and painting invites the viewer to question their meaning and to reconstruct for themselves a possible narrative.

The emphasis throughout is on painting as an active, dynamic medium, not hidebound by the constraints of history or the weight of tradition. The outcome is an exhibition energized by the artists’ preparedness to test, to play, to risk being fallible in the interest of what might arise from the beauty of effort and accident.

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