Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) States of Being (2000) Oi...

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€100,000 - €150,000

Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) States of Being (2000) Oil on canvas, triptych, 116 x 251cm (45½ x 98¾) Signed and dated 2000 verso Opus no. 731 Provenance: With Gimpel Fils Gallery, Label verso Exhibition: Paris, Galerie Jeanne-Boucher, 2006 An ambitious triptych summarising decades of the painter’s work as, he termed it, “an archaeologist of the spirit”, States of Being was exhibited at the Galerie Jeanne-Boucher in Paris in 2006. It was part of an exhibition, Radiance, marking le Brocquy’s 90th birthday. The show’s title comes from Stephen Daedalus’s invocation of the ingredients of aesthetic beauty, as being wholeness, harmony and radiance (after Thomas Aquinas). From around the mid-1950s onwards, le Brocquy was an artistic hunter whose quarry was the individual human consciousness, even though, as he noted “Evidently you cannot paint consciousness.” His approach was shaped by two decisive experiences. The first was a glimpse of some women and children against a whitewashed wall in the brilliance of noon sunlight in Spain in 1955. So intense was the light that they seemed to waver between substance and invisibility, merging with the white background. The second was stumbling on the painted Polynesian skulls in the Musée de l’Holme in Paris around the end of 1960, an event that catalysed his celebrated series of Head studies. Both were instrumental in his pursuit of conveying consciousness. The triptych format of this work suggests multiple images, a trinity, of a single being. In the central panel the figure is, like those figures against the whitewashed wall, on the point of dissolution into the vastness of time and space. In the two flanking views, the radiance glows from within the figure against a darker, layered, echoing, recessive ground. As the artist saw it, he aimed not to depict but “to reconstitute the object of one’s experience.” There is fragility and transience, but also the burning vitality of the individual presence, a voice that insists on being heard. Aidan Dunne, October 2024