Galleria Weber & Weber

30.10.24 - 7.12.24, Via S. Tommaso 7 10122, Torino TO, Italy

‘Love is the drug’ attempts to chronicle a series of moments caught, vignettes from a passing year. For Mac Athlaoich the painting experience is both these terms at play, capturing the process of making and seeing. What’s presented is a series of works, kaleidoscopic in arrangement, forming its own narrative and dialogue amongst themselves. Captured memories pass through the process of a dream-like state, fluctuating between representation and abstraction. Attention is given to the framing of subjects, playing with ready made structures within the original image while allowing for chance occurrences to determine the painting’s outcome. The game of losing and regaining a purchase on memory plays out throughout the series.

This exhibition was kindly supported by Fingal County Council

We are told to live in the present but are forever pursued by the benign treachery of memory. The world we meet measures up against the vague sum of previous impressions. Desperate for time to stop, we seek to hold on to moments that we contaminate before we ever get to archive them – like a dissipated lab assistant without gloves. How much do we ever get to know about ourselves against the shifting sands of the past, the hush of the present and an uncertain future. Our Mnemonic vernacular touches all. Fuzzy vignettes transformed to be seen anew. Palimpsest albums, the paint reveals the glazing of moments past – the non-existent made tangible, our nature made tangible. The peace of memories paints itself in the gentle melancholy hues of late autumn. Summer just slipping through our hands. Memories become memories of memories. We desperately cling to what we can salvage. We are the sum of what we recall and as all blurs and recedes – a deep cut now a mere haze of indignity – we lose a part of our most arcane selves. We rebuild it to hold on to ourselves. Layers and layers of paint dry into the seductive illusion of permanence. But all will be lost and come anew. There will be another autumn soon.

-Byron Houdayer