The Brooklyn Rail

At 447 Space, Hughie O’Donoghue’s paintings have arrived like cargo—heavy, freighted, not entirely welcome until they are. Within the cargo here is the ghosted icon, resistant to fragmentation, yet arriving always as a fragment, suspended on tarpaulin as if still in transit. Here, figure-ground relations are always espousals and disengagements of two fundamental mediums, one viscous and one diaphanous, among them oil and Gampi tissue. Irish myth and British restraint collide, photographic fact and painterly gesture haunt one another, ancient Greece and twentieth-century catastrophes negotiate and contaminate each other, all on the same tarpaulin, without resolution. Time and the Architecture of Memory gathers nine works spanning two decades: five monumental and four more intimate, with each serving as a separate excavation of the same unresolved ground.

Framed as an open tome and casting sinuous shadows against the gallery wall, A Monument in Rouen (2003) is the exhibition’s smallest work, yet no less dense with historical implication than the rest. Upon the surfaces of this relief, a forest and three motorcycles are photographic in origin yet transformed, conditioned, softened, and half-submerged by successive layers of translucent mediums. As if updating Monet’s atmospheric rendition of the Rouen Cathedral façade, O’Donoghue’s motorcycles operate as muscular machines that will espouse rust sooner than expected, only to translate themselves into memento mori of visual culture and social reality. Here the motorcycle serves as hippie freedom and military shadow, embodying the West’s impossible desire to integrate with a world it could no longer fully claim, had irreversibly altered, never quite understood, and set in motion without knowing how to stop.

In Night Visitor (2017) the fluttering surface of tarpaulin dissolves into shades of memory. On this surface four coordinates of existential reality are held in suspension: the solitary figure bearing his burden, the church whose Gothic arches reduce faith to its essential form, the earth as tangible and resistant ground, and above it all a sky whose limits attempt to defy the edge of the picture surface. As if begging for a narrative, the male figure on the left is rendered in shades of charcoal, back turned to the viewer, carrying an almost white abstraction of a cubic entity. Iconic of humanity’s ontological and existential limits—the body, birth, and death—the church arrives here as a photographic fragment, absorbed by O’Donoghue into the pictorial continuity of the tarpaulin whose accumulated folds operate as a geometric coordinate system. In this space, rhythmic hapticity and narrativity are not successive layers but simultaneous pressures on the same surface.

O’Donoghue’s photographically conditioned painting titled The Steady Drummer (2017), over three by five meters in scale, is a haunting allusion to the entropic forces of nature overwhelming the technological complicities of mankind. The strokes of fire-bright orange induce the value of rust and sea and fire, with nature asserting itself over the skeleton of the ship. Swept up in whirlwinds of paint, it is impossible not to think of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, that great warship towed to its destruction in 1839, the very year photography announced its own arrival. O’Donoghue’s composition is simultaneously imaginary, conceptual, and phenomenological by virtue of being anti-hierarchical in structure, driven by chromatic necessity rather than spatial logic, contingent in gesture, and deliberate in its refusal of pictorial order. The Steady Drummer thus juxtaposes irreducibly distinct mediums: the gestural and the photographic. This dialectical impasse is defined by two competitive languages of pictorial representation, both shaped by the recurring encounter between the man-made object and the horizon of nature. What recurs is not the ship but the archetype: the made thing set against the unmade horizon, from Phoenician timber to rusting steel.

In Tomb of the Diver (2026) a vertical band of bright yellow splits the sky-blue composition at its center, containing within it the image of a nude male diver. Unframed and suspended from above, the tarpaulin stands just shy of five meters in height. Here photography and paint together call forth a frozen moment of time within an undefined space, its surface punctuated rhythmically by air bubbles that manifest the work as low relief. Beneath the vertical trajectory of the diver, Monte Cassino anchors the composition literally as its base and historically as the site of the hilltop abbey where Allied forces assaulted the German-held Gustav Line in the winter and spring of 1944, and where the artist’s father served as a Platoon Sergeant. To the south of Naples, O’Donoghue encountered the fresco of the Paestum diver in October 2001 while excavating his father’s wartime history. Yet a few weeks earlier, a new catastrophe had shattered the reality of New York. Tomb of the Diver, completed in 2026, arrives in the twenty-fifth year of that day’s aftermath. Paestum and Monte Cassino are thus held in silent dialogue across two and a half millennia: the mythic leap of the ancient fresco and the brutal Allied assault on the hilltop abbey in 1944. The archaic leap and the modern crawl negotiate the same unresolved chromatic field. As for the diver, we are told, it is O’Donoghue himself. Here the sun-bleached white of Paestum on the south and the ash-grey rubble of Monte Cassino on the north meet across the picture surface. Here antiquity and catastrophe, myth and memory, are held in the same trembling light.

To dwell on these surfaces is to realize that this visual cargo demands its manifest. Through curatorial notes, we learn that the muscular machines in A Monument in Rouen are specifically the abandoned British motorcycle camp in a stand of trees at Moncé, where the artist’s father carried out reconnaissance missions during the Battle of France in 1940. The haunting figure in Night Visitor finds a frequency in "The Night Visiting Song," where the lover-as-ghost crosses the threshold, shadowed by the cinematic dread of the German filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu. Even the entropic fire of The Steady Drummer is given a rhythmic pulse by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman’s 1896 poem “On the Idle Hill of Summer,” grounding the chromatic necessity of the paint in the grim reality of human conflict. Housman had already been there: On the idle hill of summer / Sleepy with the flow of streams / Far I hear the steady drummer / Drumming like a noise in dreams.

In Tomb of the Diver, the sky-blue fields of abstraction bracketing the falling figure not only resist iconographic closure but necessitate competing and irresolvable readings that no single narrative can exhaust. The documentary notes beckon, but to follow them too far is to trade the visceral experience of the tarpaulin for the safety of the archive. Yet, O’Donoghue’s project demands this exact friction. The text does not resolve the paintings; rather, it identifies the unresolved ground they occupy. By naming the ghosts—the father, the soldier, the diver—O’Donoghue does not close the narrative. At this threshold, photography and painting become a palimpsest of memory, where every layer is present but none is fully legible. Here ancient Paestum, golden and luminous, and the ravaged stones of Monte Cassino, scarred and still smoldering in memory, meet across the picture surface in a silence that is both historical and inconsolable.