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Michael Canning​

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Les yeux

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8 May - 13 June 2025

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Oliver Sears Gallery is pleased to present Les yeux, a solo exhibition by Michael Canning, featuring nine new paintings that investigate the act of looking as both sensory process and philosophical engagement.

 

This concentrated body of work reflects Canning’s ongoing interest in painting’s ability to operate as a site of meditative attention and transformation.

Painted with rare intensity, Canning’s signature paintings of hedgerow weeds call to mind art historical figures such as Hans Memling, Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach and Joachim Patinir, yet are utterly contemporary. Complex, absorbing, poignant and occasionally sombre, they are always engaging, deeply mysterious and often surprising despite their familiarity.

 

While at once deeply conversant with the languages of European painting, and uniquely Irish, they are paintings about our world, our human frailties, and about the meaning of art itself.

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At the heart of the exhibition is a group of small paintings devoted to trees, addressing ideas around the complexity of vision. Focusing in on the trunk of a tree with branches splayed out, others encroaching on the picture plane, countless twigs, thousands of pine needles, bringing the viewer on a journey through ever smaller and smaller elements to the most minute details, a space of seemingly infinite entanglement. Canning orchestrates the composition, initiates, cultivates and maintains a set of processes leading to a conclusive image which we may feel that we have simultaneously never seen before, yet somehow always known.

 

Recalling the very first European landscape paintings, those by Albrecht Altdorfer and Hans Baldung Grien, this group of works are romantic, bleak, obsessive in their fastidious observation, and poignant. The scale is intimate, almost devotional.

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The inclusion of a single painting of a severed human finger punctuates the exhibition with a macabre note. Evocative and enigmatic, the image reverberates with symbolic weight—a subtle reminder of the corporeal trace within artistic creation and the presence of the body, both subject and instrument, in the act of seeing. At once arresting and enigmatic, it signals the presence of the body and poses a reminder of mortality, of touch, and of the role of human agency in the creation of cultural meaning.

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Taken together, the works in Les yeux constitute a quiet but profound inquiry into the complexities of visual experience. They reward extended viewing, revealing layers of meaning that unfold gradually and refuse immediate resolution. Canning’s practice insists on slowness—on the idea that seeing is not instantaneous, but cumulative, intimate, and transformative.

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These are paintings that ask to be looked at not just once, but slowly and repeatedly — yielding their meanings in time, raising questions about what it means to look deeper and longer at the ordinary, about how we see, and what that means.

 

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