Semiose

Art is about telling stories and telling ourselves stories. In Anthony Cudahy's work, the stories, the situations, the events that he tells and recounts to us, and on which we project, superimpose or merge our experiences, our dreams, our desires or our hopes, are of a disarming authenticity and vulnerability. Her commitment and honesty to being an artist, to being a painter in our current world, is exemplary.

His exhibition at the Semiose gallery brings together some twenty paintings and a dozen drawings around the enigmatic title A Moon Sets A Knife, borrowed from Federico García Lorca's Bodas de sangre [Blood Wedding]. But if in the original play the moon leaves a knife abandoned in the air ["La luna deja un cuchillo abandonado en el aire, que siendo acecho de plomo quiere ser dolor de sangre"], in Anthony Cudahy's Cutting Terror the kneeling female character holds up a knife - of lead? - in order to tear, in a pain of blood, a canvas representing a motif of horse familiar to the artist. Far from the banal destruction of a failed canvas, the treatment of this painting in shades of red, the pose of the protagonist, the decisive gesture of the cut and the canvas on the ground treated as a reflective surface make it a real pictorial blood wedding revisited in the form of a ritual murder or an original variation of the myth of Narcissus. Similar open-ended games of intertwined meanings are thus at work in all of Anthony Cudahy's proposals carefully selected for this exhibition. And the balancing act between realism and symbolism, description and fiction, suggests a thousand filiations to be deciphered and reconnected, a thousand threads to be unwound and rewoven.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator