A New Field Of Vision

MARGARITA CAPPOCK

In the sixth lecture, Stella (Frank Stella delivered the Charles Eliot Norton series of lectures at Harvard University) began to speak in disarmingly personal tones of his ambition early on to make abstract paintings “that would inhabit a world of their own”. The statement is apposite on viewing the paintings of John Noel smith, a singular abstract artist not only in a Irish context, but also internationally, where he has had considerable success. Not only do Smith’s paintings inhabit a world of their own, they draw the viewer into that world with an inescapable presence and energy that resonates on several different levels – formally, conceptually, intellectually and emotionally.

Autonomous Realities And The World Beyond

ENRIQUE JUNCOSA

John Noel Smith belongs to this generation of abstract painters who started showing at the end of the 1970s, consolidating their language by the 1980s, and were finally celebrated by the 1990s. Other Irish painters, like Sean Scully, Ciaran Lennon and Felim Egan, belong to this generation, to which we can add other names from the American and European art scene, like Jonathan Lasker, Terry Winters, Philip Taaffe, Mary Heilmann, Peter Halley, David Reed, Bernard Frize, Juan Usle, Domenico Bianchi, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Helmut Dorner, and Gunther Forg.

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John Noel Smith: Didymus / Multipolar / Passage, 2021
Gandon Editions,
(Hardback, 152 pages)