Darragh Kennedy is a visual artist from Co. Mayo with a BA in Fine Art Painting. Their current body of work responds to ideas of lost Modern optimism, generating imagined landscapes wherein tensions between contemporary acceleration contrasts painted studies as a form of deceleration.  

Recurrent subjects such as paper planes and fortune tellers illustrate handmade objects built with humour and tactile attention. Illusionary qualities of painted paper then appear as counterweights of discard and detachment suggesting a contemporary divorce from this material care as well as an intent to glean such leftovers through image-making.  

They employ diagram style compositions, lending a sense of modern rationale and organisation to painted materiality, allowing an exchange between logical symbols and material sensitivity. Their use of perspective and architectural features extends the attention of these studies to a spatial logic suggesting a relation between care and the built environment.   

This investigation is driven by an exploration of 20th century optimism in Modern architecture and past ideals of social betterment. Inherent qualities of canvas and paper as impassable flatness parallels hostile architecture, an obstructive urban trend divorced from such modern optimism. Through this relation, apparitions of spaces and horizon lines act as optimistic manoeuvres seeking to recreate flatness to open space, contrast contemporary proliferation of genericity and obstruction in urbanity, and allow the horizon line to be maintained as a symbol of futurity.