‘There’s a huge sensuous pleasure in making a colour’ Fergus Martin tells Brian McAvera as an exhibition of his work opens at IMMA
Brian McAvera: Fergus, you have a marked interest in design, fashion and display, all terms that could be applied to minimalist abstraction. Do you see a link between those elements and minimalist abstraction?
Fergus Martin: One of the reasons that I don’t know the answer to your question is because everything that excites and moves me goes into me; and any experience of life goes into making what is then described as minimalist abstraction. In fact, I often have the sensation that a painting is not a flat ‘minimal’ thing, but something that’s likely to explode any minute. I lived in Milan for ten years and some of the best Italian fashion and design is so simple. I taught in a school there which was in the middle of the high-fashion shopping district; I saw things I’d never seen in Ireland, like shops with just one item in it. Also, the way Italians use materials in design and fashion is extraordinary. Fashion Week on Via della Spiga was like theatre – in the shops, on the street – again, we’d never seen anything like it. In history, the great love in painting for me is Giotto and you can’t get more pared down than his forms and colours – and you can’t separate that from his humanity. I try to distill everything in my work. I love feelings of density and intensity – I love when something feels almost unbearable
Research into theoretical principles across the fields of art, science and aesthetics imbue Nuala O’Donovan’s work, writes Mark Ewart
Eamonn Doyle’s portraits of Dubliners are unposed, untroubled by vanity and full of momentum, writes Stephanie McBride
