The O3 Gallery is a tiny place at the back of Oxford Castle’s miniature restaurant plaza. Through a few gravelled puddles and around a truck of laundry the glass door opens into a stone round-room washed in grey. Two wiry flights of stairs lead into the lower half, where more supporting wires give the place a weird gleam of modern minimalist cool, though very little space for proper viewing.
O’Sullivan is a graduate of De Montford University but also boasts a Masters at Gloucester and Cheltenham College, and is involved in local art projects. Her work is full of psychedelic clashing and rigidly-bound abstract colour juxtaposed with gorgeous bleedings such as in NYC (midtown). Each piece layers grid after grid onto free-flowing backgrounds. The straight-line meshes suggest something of the rapid single-minded rigidity of city-living, the free natural world let loose in the background upon which they tread.
Her main work is all acrylic and giglee prints – not for fans of representational art, colours which agree with each other, or indeed, any richness of texture at all. The lines upon lines upon lines are carved delicately into the canvas to ensure their rigidity; she separates the reflection on a skyscraper into vicious rectangular shapes. Nothing moves except in a ruler-straight linear fashion, as in Painting 02, NYC Series. The urban landscape is displayed in grid street patterns, road markings, neon colours, all bristling with the rushing routines of a city – and the monotony. In another series, white foremost in white grids carelessly exclude a background of running acrylic, and all aslant – bizarre window blinds barring the indistinct outer world. Some series of grids just look like weaving in a mechanical, mathematically straight fashion, as in 21 NYC, Tomkins Square.
The SP/02 Series has a large centre square, or diamond, which is the focus of its adjacent lines. As I descend the stairs, the square rotates, drawing the lines after it as the eye naturally moves between one work and the next. Like the sky between skyscrapers, the space moves as the viewer moves, changing between black and white for night and day, flickering immediately with accelerated time. Bowery Garden and Bowery Kitchen are mosaics of colour between street grids or window frames – there need be no distinction – and the diamond skyscapes roll between them.
O’Sullivan’s drawings are dramatically different. Dark, strong charcoals of willowy line, which deviate between the thick and slender, bold and elegant. Triangles open to trumpets of bulb-like depth, and light and shade is emphasised to create mass and energy: very Georgia O’Keeffe. The undulating lines of Close swell towards each other thickly; there are charcoal bristlings, smudgings and crossings, but a very distinct division of colour between grey, white and black. The opposite states of colour are forbidden to mingle by the thick line ground into the canvas. Square Drawing quashes these patterns together, thin and thick cross each other and absorb each other; the result is almost womb-like, dark and all-encompassing.
O’Sullivan’s idea of city life seems to relate to exclusion. The colours provide the variety of identities, or movements, running past, over and under each other in webs of determined exclusion: a tapestry of clashing colour whose contact is never transformative or merging. Go and see this if you happen to be passing, and maybe pick up a card – the works do look better off the walls – but definitely not something to visit before you die. The venue is sweet and trendy, however, and makes a good backing for the new and interesting.
By Hannah Thompson
Christine O’Sullivan City Limits, O3 Gallery, 24.11.07-23.12.07
