Cian Duggan

This series of paintings draw images from history, art, public domain, and stock photos found online. These are digitally layered with cut-out elements of previous public interventions that have since disappeared—the work explores our culture of image authorship, memory perception, and on/offline presence.

The collages depict feverous visions of imaginary spaces that reappropriate the forms of my public paintings within new perimeters. Printed on plexiglass sheets, these modified images are overlaid by enamel paintings that act to ground the work with a presence in our reality. The painting is now both an intentional act and one with a constantly shifting presence, in a constant state of renewal and reform. The moving of the image into our physical reality shows the painting and time itself as fluid. Where fiction bleeds in and out of our lived realities.

This is also a continuation of the investigation into my philosophy that paintings can appear anywhere in life. Not just fixed in place or locked away, but for them to exist without a static location or even dimension.

My work is underpinned by the concept of in-between states, the fluidity of memory, and our deep-set desire to escape. That we all in some way dream of leaving for an alternative reality. The merging of imagery in the works points towards the idea of non-linear timelines coexisting and the romanticism of escape to and from them.

HOUSE OF STAIN

I found this image on a stock photography database. I’m almost positive I've seen it somewhere before, but cannot place where. Familiar, yet distant. Like memory residue. The nature of stock photography is fluid. To be used, reused, and remixed without boundary or authorship, over and over again. Ever-changing yet indifferent.

Similar to our memories and time itself, they are a non-linear fragmented force, in-flux, being reconstructed by the past, present, and future, endlessly. How is our experience of reality and memory formed? What happens if you reorder layers of time? What might leak out?

DESPERATELY ONE

There’s a deep uncertainty embedded in the painting, La Derelitta or The Desperate One. Throughout history, the work has been attributed to multiple artists (such as Botticelli and Lippi) and It’s unclear who the lone figure is or what exactly has taken place?

We see walls, we see a door but do we know which side we’re on? Are we trapped or are we free? It’s as if there is key information missing, like there has been an error in a “system”. What has been displaced, or is in hiding?

“Don’t wait to be hunted to hide” - Samuel Beckett

The Amber Room, once considered to be the 8th wonder of the world, which disappeared in the midst of WW2. Theories as to its whereabouts, and whether it even still exists, have been put forward over the years, yet the mystery remains unsolved.

I aim to reshape the narrative and give way to the possibility that the room exists elsewhere, somewhere on an alternative timeline.