OnTheTown: Rather than paint over the cracks as some of us do, Brian Fay, whose first solo show in Dublin opened at the Lab on Foley Street this week, choose to highlight the cracks themselves. In the exhibition, Some Time Now, the artist examined works by artists such as Vermeer and Da Vinci, and painstakingly copied the cracks from the original paintings, creating new works in the process.
The artist even confessed to being inspired by the cover of an Irish Times Magazine, which depicted the Mona Lisa in all its cracked and ageing glory as it appeared on the cover of a David Hockney book.
Speaking at the opening, Mick Wilson, head of fine art at Dublin Institute of Technology, paid tribute to Fay's work. "The work here doesn't appeal to cliche, even as it draws on grand tradition," he told a room crowded with artists, art students and patrons of the arts, testimony to the growing interest in visual arts. As city arts officer Jack Gilligan pointed out: "As a nation, we weren't very visually aware before, and we're still not quite there."
But the turnout to support Fay was evidence that things are changing, and Gilligan is determined that Dublin should play a major role in this.
If the work on display in the Lab is anything to go by, the city is already having an impact. While Fay's exhibition opened downstairs, eight other artists were exhibiting upstairs in the same building in a show called Pleasures and Days, which draws together work from Mark Beatty, Frederica Bastide Duarte, Ian Charlesworth, Roisin Lewis, Cora Cummins, Alison Pilkington, Paul Flannery and John O'Connell.