Quarry, 2011

The central interest in Niamh O’Malley’s research is the status of the image, its existence that is simultaneously a fact external to the viewer and a fact constructed by the viewer in the very act of looking. This subject has a distant ancestry in positivist studies of optics in the nineteenth century and its roots thus can be found in the history of painting, both as a development of pictorial techniques in relation to photography and color theory, and as illusive language, devoted since antiquity to mimesis and to the deception of trompe l’oeil. Image and eye conspire to create the deception that they feed off, and both, Niamh O’Malley seems to say, fail to establish any possible relationship with reality and its truth. [...]