"Circa" art magazine about Oliver Whelan

“The paintings that form Oliver Whelan’s Temple Bar exhibition fall into two distinct, even diametrically opposed categories. All are made on sheets of paper of uniform size and format, and mounted on wood. One group is painted in acrylic and consists of single, representational images. The other is painted in oil and consists of pairs of quarters of abstract images, organize in modular partnerships – modular because they are essentially interchangeable, all over compositions.
The representational paintings are meticulous, close to monochromatic records of textured surfaces, depicted in what appears to be almost macroscopic detail. In fact they look as if they might well be considerable enlargements of fragments views of the surfaces of the abstract painting, in which tiny ridges and furrows of pigment come to resemble the major physical structure of landscape.
So on the one hand we have works that exemplify painting as a process of depiction, and on the other work that exemplify painting as enactment. In the former that technique is devoted to making itself invisible in the service of representational image, in the latter the process of each painting making become the image. That much in self evident from a cursory look at the show, but the juxtaposition, also suggests that the difference between them isn’t as clear-cut as it might seem”

Review over Oliver Whelan works from “Circa” magazine