Ó Áit Go hÁit

"Some years ago the office of Public Works compiled an inventory of the Wexford Landscape. By virtue of approaching a subject from a different angle, the landscape surrendered what had hitherto been beyond visual comprehension, revealing a decorous quilt with the most imaginative and seemingly perpetual fulachta fiadh sites, ringforts, ploughed out crop marks and moated sites. In essence, it was a repository of the human memory which until its exposure had been relaimed and partly hidden by the duvet of history, the landscape.
The inventory reminded us that a landscape, with the fingerprint of our ancient presence is, to paraphrase C.J. Jung, like the unconscious mind a storehouse of relics and memories.
When I first saw Paddy Lennon's work I immediately drew a private comparison with his inventory although I couldn't figure why. Eventually I realised that the canvas of the artist and the canvas of the landscape, what we might refer to as the visual residual after the onslaught of change, were the consequence of two magnificent sculptors, time and imagination.
When we allow our vision to bask in the diffraction of Lennon's colours, spawned by an imagination as acute as an aperture, we are ideally placed to fully grasp Cezanne's principle: when colour has its greatest richness, then form has its plenitude.
At a time when much of contemporary Irish art is invigorating because of ideas rather than pictures, it is refreshing to be able to bask in the dextrous variation of Lennon's oil landscapes; they are, like the inventory, the essence of revelation.
Modern art often stands accused of being inaccessible; but rather than looking for the right answers we might refrain from asking the wrong questions. It is, after all, the attentiveness of the light which unfurls the bud.
Stand before paintings like 'Below', 'Inbher' or 'Seascape' and marvel at Lennon's evocation of the interplay of tone and form, at how expeditious in the retinal sensation as both light and form duel for centre stage.
There is a simmering suffusion in Paddy Lennon's work, a harmony of contrast, such as the calm prelude you experience in the path of an approaching storm."