When the Abstract Expressionists wanted to create a school, they called it The Subjects of the Artist. It was there that artists met in the evenings to discuss abstraction, then a new thing. Though long gone, the name of the school suggests something that is still relevant today. What is it that artists are trying to get at? What is the real subject? For the last two decades Eithne Jordan has been devoting her efforts predominately to painting buildings. Just as we associate Morandi with bottles, Katz with faces, and Poussin with arrangements of people, from her small gouaches on paper to the large oil paintings it is easy to connect her to architecture.
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Eithne Jordan at The MAC /
by Ben Street
Travel is, for the most part, not the nouns and verbs of time but its qualifiers and prepositions, the bits in between. Look at anyone’s travel photos, shared on social media: time and space are concertina’d into a single lofty peak whose valleys magically disappear in posterity, in imitation of our selective memories. The self-edited life isthe life. Past imperfect, present perfect. And yet we know that the experience of travel is really a series of protracted conjunctions in a sentence. Elided from an anecdotal afterlife – then we got here, then we waited there – these liminal moments are what constitute the majority of our lives. But looked at properly, they emanate a coiled energy, like a deep breath before a dive. Eithne Jordan’s paintings of cityscapes collectively present a modest proposal about travel: that every journey provides the receptive eye with an opportunity to find beauty in disorientation and estrangement.
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Small Worlds
The art of losing yourself in the paintings of Eithne Jordan
by Gemma Tipton
Whether you are drawn into one of her miniature pieces, beguiled into its world through the delicate delineations of detail and space; or whether you are standing before a larger work, vividly imagining the heat, sounds and smells of the city; Eithne Jordan’s paintings present places that are tantalisingly recognizable, yet discretely unreachable. Jordan’s painting is not about the icons of architecture, those glib clichés each city manufactures to put itself on the map of tourist consciousness. Instead, her travels capture side spaces, factory roofs, subway tunnels, the corners of courtyards, underpasses, blank walls; those non-places that art often tends to forget.
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