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Over the last six years, Eamonn Doyle has made his way into the world of photography, first with a collection of works entitled Dublin Trilogy, later followed by K, a series shot in Ireland and Spain.
Through his work, Doyle invites the viewer on a sensorial journey. This multifaceted artist is also a musician and manages to infuse his images with a mood that only a music maker knows how to achieve. When you observe his photographs, it seems as if a song of emptiness, asphalt and loneliness were playing in the background.
In the Dublin Trilogy, Doyle shows us his city from a personal viewpoint through the anonymous characters that populate his day to day. He traps passers by in his lens, with shots that seem to look them up and down as if to underline the sharpness of the metallic sounds that reverberate in the concrete.
Doyle exposes us to the desolate nature of the outside world in K, a series of unforgiving, cloth-covered figures in which the bulky mass of material itself appears to swell up inside the silhouette. Is it possible to bring musicality to a photograph? To extract dance from an image?
Brushstrokes of colour with the camera
“I always wanted to be a painter — and I think I still want to be — so I’m constantly impressed by the differences between the two processes. In painting you take on a blank canvass but in the street that canvass is already full,” explains Doyle.
Eamonn Doyle composes and performs his solitary song in photographic canvasses, in dry, abrupt landscapes of concrete, cobblestones and road markings. The brightly coloured clothes of his figures become brushstrokes against the arid background which surrounds them. The landscape is thrust into a disquieting dance where, with radiant power, figure takes protagonism over context.
Can a photograph morph into a motionless dance?
Figures of light and colour vanish under a blue sky; clouds thread their way between the cloths. On arid ground stands a figure wrapped in veils and veiled in movement; occasionally you can make out a head, a waist, a hip… At the same time it could be something completely different, something which exists despite this landscape. Changing figures of colour and shape, ever turning, bellowing out the sound of emptiness.
Forms, textures and gestures that suggest musical contrasts in evolution. These are the photographic paintings of Eamonn Doyle, images that entrap us just as the figures they portray are entrapped.
Exhibition: Eamonn Doyle in Sala Fundación Mapfre Bárbara de Braganza from 12 September to 26 January
Photography: Oscar Rivilla
Translation: Rebekah Jane Rhodes
Music: Dr Symptosizer
Art Direction: Oscar Rivilla & Carolina Verd
Styling collaboration: Carolina Omaña
Fashion:
Courtesy from Bryan Park Comunicación
Carolina Verd 