FROM the start, Oliver Comerford was a young artist with a certain following a tribute above all to the fact that he has a strong and easily recognisable style. And not only a strong style, it is also an uninhibited, head on one, marked by strong effects of light and chiaroscuro, harshly contemporary subject matter and an immediate sense of emotional engagement. You feel, in fact, that you are right in the middle of the action.
The bulk of his exhibition at the Hallward Gallery is painted in series rows of small or smallish pictures, for the most part, which are usually variations on a single theme. The Dwellings series, for instance, focuses on a succession of quasi derelict buildings, at once alike and contrasting with one another this very effective sequence, by the way, has been bought by the Hugh Lane Gallery. Other series take as their theme various long distance car journeys, conveying the immediacy of impressions seen at speed, the exhilaration or bleakness of the highway stretching ahead, and sometimes the challenge of unfamiliar routes and the desolate sense of being lost (Map Reading).
Comerford has something in common with the Photo realists, but he is less hard edged and geometrical, and his colour is strong, almost lurid, with aggressive contrasts of light and shade and an eye for the harsh effects of artificial lighting. By the nature of his style, he regularly courts risk, and he teeters sometimes on the edge of brashness and obviousness, but there is a kind of courageous, existential" grappling with the contemporary world in all its facets not excluding its frequent ugliness and banality, and the endemic hostility of man made environments to the people who inhabit them, or merely pass through them.
