UPCOMING
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PAUL HALLAHAN: SET ADRIFT ON MEMORY BLISS
December 5, 2026 - January 8, 2026
opening reception: Friday, December 5 (6-8pm)
A selection of paintings by Dublin, Ireland-based artist Paul Hallahan, spanning from 2018 to 2025.
Set Adrift on Memory Bliss takes its title from the PM Dawn song from the early 1990s. It has always stayed with me for its drifting sense of reflection and distance, for the way it holds calm and melancholy at the same time. That same feeling, of being suspended between presence and memory, is at the center of these paintings.
I have always been interested in the blurred image, in the moment when things begin to lose their edge and merge together. There is something truthful in that space, something that feels closer to how memory and perception actually operate. A sharply defined image can seem too certain, while a blurred one allows movement and change. It gives space for the imagination to become part of what is seen.
In all these works I use thin layers of paint on semi-transparent surfaces, so that light can move through them and alter what appears. Depending on where you stand, the paintings can shift, sometimes coming into focus before dissolving again into atmosphere. I want that instability to feel present, because it mirrors how experience and memory constantly reshape one another.
Painting for me is a way to stay inside that uncertainty. It allows for a kind of attention that is slow and unguarded, where looking becomes a form of thought. The title Set Adrift on Memory Bliss feels right because it speaks to that sense of drifting, of allowing memory and perception to carry you somewhere without the need to arrive.
These works are about that movement, the quiet rhythm between what is seen, what is remembered, and what might still be waiting to appear.
- Paul Hallahan, Dublin, Ireland, October 2025
photograph by Maria Maarbjerg
Paul Hallahan’s work returns again and again to questions of nature, perception, and the shifting ground between clarity and uncertainty. He primarily paints, though his practice also includes sculpture and video, each medium offering a different route toward contemplation.
His paintings are built slowly through thin, layered washes that hold and reflect light. Rather than presenting fixed images, they remain open and fluid, changing subtly with time, light, and perspective. Each work becomes an environment in itself; atmospheric, temporal, and elusive. They resist finality and instead invite close attention, asking the viewer to linger. Hallahan’s practice is thoughtful and measured, grounded in the belief that visual work can hold space for reflection and remain active long after it is made. Whether on canvas or screen, the works speak quietly, holding presence without insistence.Interests within his work expand into many areas but commonly focus on how we as a species relate and interact with nature, taking art as a form or by-product of nature and our civilization. Using various methods and techniques his paintings are built up of thin layers on mostly raw canvases which allow light move through the works and change within the spaces they are located, transcending the composition and initial image of the work to the viewer.
Hallahan is the 2018 recipient of the Golden Fleece Award, a coveted Irish Visual Arts Award, and his paintings are held in both public and private collections, including The Arts Council Ireland, Trinity College in Dublin, the Kildare County Council, and the Irish Government Agency Office of Public Works.
Paul Hallahan
true level digging comes up, goes down
2018
acrylic ink and paint on canvas
approx. 88.5 by 60 in.
(ca. 224,8 by 152,4 cm)
This work is rooted in a moment of change, when I stopped curating to focus fully on painting again. I began by experimenting with moving image and overhead projectors, trying to record light shows that were always shifting, always failing in some sense. The work has a location in mind, the Kildare/Wicklow area where I grew up, close to where Francis Bacon also grew up. It is a place that resonates because of my first experiences there with naturally grown Irish mushrooms. But that failure left me with a stack of material, and I leaned into it to make this painting. It started abstract, but soon settled on landscape as its anchor. The abstraction of an already unstable form, like landscape itself, held my interest much more than abstraction for its own sake. It was in this piece that the energy for all the work that followed truly began.
Paul Hallahan
Lotus
2022
acrylic on canvas
approx. 60 by 88.5 in.
(ca. 152,4 by 224,8 cm)
This painting was about the thick, breathing density of the world's undergrowth, but I didn't want the literal image. It was a search for the feeling of being overwhelmed by lushness, and I tried to capture that by pushing the materials to their absolute limit. During this time, I was living in South Donegal, and the darkness and perpetual damp of the Leitrim forests, so often referenced by Yeats and other poets, fascinated me. I spent time building up heavy layers of paint, discovering a process that allowed me to pull the base image back into sharp focus, detail by detail. It became a significant piece for me because it was where I truly learned how much pressure the canvas could take, the breaking point where the work finds its necessary tension.
Paul Hallahan
Need You
2022
acrylic on canvas
approx. 14 by 12 in.
(ca. 35 by 30 cm)
I began this canvas as part of a series I had wanted to make for years, using an album instead of a landscape as my structure. I chose Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. It was an album I first encountered as a teenager, put down, and only returned to later, sensing I wasn't ready for it yet. The understanding I finally reached was that it is a conceptual piece, flawed and angry and sometimes cartoonish, but necessary to hear. Making these paintings was a way to pull it apart and question my own early entry into culture.
Paul Hallahan
Ruiner
2022
acrylic on canvas
approx. 14 by 12 in.
(ca. 35 by 30 cm)
This painting is one of a small series where the subject is not landscape, but music. It is anchored entirely to Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, a powerful and often difficult album that I returned to years after first encountering it. The whole project was an attempt to find visual form within something that is deliberately chaotic and emotionally intense. This canvas tries to hold the album's flawed, anxious energy, that cartoonish anger that is still, somehow, necessary to encounter. It is a record of that internal process and a confrontation with how we first take in culture.
Paul Hallahan
water runs nervous
2023
oil on canvas
approx. 12 by 14 in.
(ca. 30 by 35 cm)
I came back to oil in 2021, after using acrylics for years due to a sensitivity to the fumes. I had to relearn everything; how to mix, how to layer color again, since oil behaves so differently. The works I began with were all smaller pieces, looking at the landscapes in and around West Sligo. Those locations are the essential source material, but the paintings only become themselves when the abstraction takes over.
Paul Hallahan
thought after thought after thought
2023
oil on canvas
approx. 19.7 by 23.6 in.
(ca. 50 by 60 cm)
This piece was part of the smaller oil works I completed in 2023, coming loosely from photographs taken in West Sligo. It captures a view of large storm clouds arriving from the North Atlantic, a moment of immense, indifferent power. I have always seen landscape as the truest view of our society. We like to think we are beyond it in how we talk and live, but the nature we inhabit is and will always be the most important force. Our survival is linked entirely to its permission.
Paul Hallahan
Rhythm, multiplicity
2025
oil on canvas
approx. 19.7 by 15.7 in.
(ca. 50 by 40 cm)
Paul Hallahan
Harmony, equational
2025
oil on canvas
approx. 19.7 by 15.7 in.
(ca. 50 by 40 cm)
Paul Hallahan
Melody horizon speed
2025
oil on canvas
approx. 19.7 by 15.7 in.
(ca. 50 by 40 cm)
This recent series of three small paintings (Rhythm, multiplicity; Harmony, equational; and Melody horizon speed) concludes a period of singular focus. The attention here shifted entirely to the line, not as a boundary, but as a deliberate, layered construction. Each piece begins with the West Waterford landscape, but that is only ever the initial sight, the thing you look at before you intentionally look away. The process is one of abstraction and blurring, moving past literal representation until the work becomes something independent: a quiet record of looking, followed by the essential and freeing act of letting go.
Paul Hallahan
Duel
2025
oil on canvas
approx. 60 by 88.5 in.
(ca. 152,4 by 224,8 cm)
This painting carries the longest memory, spanning three years of work but with a concept that goes back over a decade to a video I never finished. It finds its location in the trees used in Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon; the site of the duel that begins the character’s journey. I was fascinated by that spot: its connection to the deception that drives the story, and the fact that the trees still stand on the grounds of an old Knight Templar fortress. The painting started slight, colour-wise, but over the years and many layers, it finally found its reference point. It is rooted in that deceptive history, yet insists on being its own image entirely.