On the other side of the mirror: waters of night, by Pádraig Timoney
About waters of night, Pádraig Timoney’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, the press release says that the Irish artist “presents in Lisbon a new perspective of his research on the construction of the image”. Upon encountering the mirrors materialised by him and paintings situated between abstraction and figuration, visitors entering Galeria Zé dos Bois may perhaps infer that this is merely formal research, employing the mechanics of the image to form a metalinguistic narrative – an exhibition for other visual artists.
But the excerpts from the book The Death of Virgil in the introductory text prove that the scope is much wider. In this lyrical meditation by Austrian Hermann Broch, the final moments of Virgil, author of the Aeneid, are filled with the fear and dread that his work is an empty ode to beauty. The narrator recalls: “[…] above the law of the artist, who only wants harmony, is the law of reality”. Rather than a musing circumscribed to art, whose concern would be to unravel the limits and essence of the pictorial, Timoney seems interested in a different question: what can an image do? What happens at its point of contact with reality and what dimensions of inner and outer life can it transport us into?
At this point I think of other cosmologies and mythologies that embrace the figure of the mirror, beyond an idea of reflection that merely shifts the Same to another place, pinning down the usual Western anxieties about copy, counterfeit and originality. A two-fold risk emerges from this obsession with authenticity: on the one hand, the overweening belief in the image as the ultimate sign of truth and its supposed immediate efficacy; on the other, the scepticism in considering that the image has no power whatsoever, and that its destiny is to disappear. I suddenly observe that the 15 glasses manually mirrored by the artist, as well as the six Broken and two Half-broken Mirrors, do not enter the Lacanian world of mirrors – they are not tools for the primary identification of One with oneself.
They point to a complex notion of image and vision, with infinite nuances and possibilities. For example, in Aztec civilisation, mirrors were mediators of divinatory practices – instruments that, instead of reproducing the surrounding reality, profoundly displayed that which we do not see or know. Looking at the seductive black of the obsidian, the rock upon which these magical objects were built, meant glimpsing prophecies, gods and ancestral spirits. Mirrors that only revealed their image, fragmented and nebulous, to people who exercised their ability to see – to touch, hear, feel and taste with their eyes. Mirrors whose images are portals to past, future, visible and invisible.
With plenty of training, we may be able to see again through Timoney’s “broken” and clouded surfaces. Where reflections used to be, this artist-alchemist – who has mastered night waters and the chemistry of mirror-making – shows us fewer images than the act of imagining. And, interestingly, we learn that much of the work in this exhibition – co-produced with Indipendenza in Rome, where it was originally presented in 2022 – was made during the first wave of the coronavirus. In a volatile context, which took the artist from New York to Berlin, and marked by the lockdown, which probably shut him somewhere between four walls, Timoney rediscovered the mirror, not as a replicating device (of the real, of beauty, of life, of art, of the same, of illness, of the banal), but rather a passage to other planes, terrains and times. What can an image do?
waters of night, curated by Natxo Checa and Gérard Faggionato, opened at Galeria Zé dos Bois on January 21, 2023 and ends on April 22.