The Molesworth Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings by Francis Matthews.
In this latest body of work, followers of the artist will recognise the familiar subject matter of urban architecture: details of streets and buildings that might otherwise go unnoticed or be cursorily dismissed as unworthy of representation due to a drab or discordant appearance. For Matthews, however, these mundane elements of the urban landscape are ripe with possibilities, energized by the sophisticated interplay of light and shadow.
Francis Matthews graduated with a first-class honours degree in architecture from UCD before pursuing a career as an artist. He has won multiple awards at the RHA Annual, including the Hennessy Craig Scholarship.
We're publishing a hardback book to accompany the show. The introductory text by Dr Ellen Rowley can be read below.
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Almost blacker than black:
Francis Mathews and the uncanny art of total balance and almost blackness
by Dr Ellen Rowley
So, I’m standing in the artist’s kitchen. His kitchen is the rear room of the house: a two-storey city cottage, at the end of a terrace which feeds directly to a busy road. There’s barely a path, or so it feels, between the artist’s house and his neighbourhood, in transit. His cottage is built into a hill. Beside it is an industrial lot – selling plumbing wares. Out front, across the busy road and up aways, there is another hill, built in layers. And maybe, because it’s a rainy windblown day, the artist’s house is prevailed upon by all of this. It is in a valley of wet, greyish sandwich-board city.
Back to the artist’s kitchen where I stand before ‘Inchicore 1’ – one of three or four larger oil-on-board paintings. It is black. No, almost black. Together the artist and I look at what he has made here. Eyes adjust and heads tilt, and just as I contemplate the artist’s vampiric tendencies, the black begins to dissolve. Things (terraced housing, a big wall, a lower wall and railings, some trees) emerge, peripherally. Actually, they were always there; and anyway, there was enough puddled and pot-holed, streetlight-reflected tarmacadam middle-ground to perceive all along. Keep looking, and the dominant crossroads composition of this middle-ground fades back while a vertical world of traffic and street light poles comes to the fore. Sharpening and framing our view, these verticals make way in the end for the painting’s real heroes - the illuminated traffic bollards. A sentinel of five white plastic glowing squat columns, they are remarkable in their rhythm and in their ordinariness, made extraordinary.
No vampiric tendencies, after all.
I’ve lots of questions. Is it always a photograph to begin with? Yes. Must it be immediately local? No. Is it usually night-time? Yes, or dawn. What about people: are there never people? No people. But there’s always figure and ground.
The artist shows me two smaller studies of the same scene – ‘Inchicore (grey) 1’ and another. Like cartoons to a masterpiece, these ostensibly deconstruct or describe the larger work. The artist describes his grid method, rendered visible here through pencil on a matt black acrylic base. He describes modifying photographic distortion, tweaking perspective, making new horizon lines and figuring out vanishing points. He describes thinning his oil paints and layering his figures; counting bricks and counting courses.
Apparently making these night-time paintings is an intensely objective and technical challenge for the artist; one which absorbs him and reminds us all of his architecture formation. The artist was educated as an architect. Translating is what architects do. Indeed, the artist is technical and he is methodical in his acts of translation. I have heard that he could always draw a perfect circle, quickly and without contemplation. As we climb the spiral stairs to his studio, I muse over his geometric bearing; his total balance; his centredness. And by the time I’ve walked around this north-facing piano nobile room, encountering about ten more paintings and one in progress (‘South Circular’) on the easel, I believe that his technical preoccupations are only half the story. The artist’s paintings are also intensely biographical.
I mean, of course.
From incandescent rainy street surfaces of night-time Inchicore, to variegated walls and curious foliage forms punctuating his neighbourhood skies, the artist has translated a host of intriguing compositions. Picked up, we imagine, by way of his camera lens as he walks the ground, these paintings, as I see them tentatively grouped in the studio room, become the artist’s urban biography of sorts. Through them, we find his favourite walls or a curious clump of weeds; or a stray branch which, when stopped at traffic lights the artist sees emblazoned, periodically, in red. They are intimate views then, fused to his and to our very own nerve endings. Unsurprisingly, as I turn around in the studio I note a postcard of a De Chirico scene: nerve endings, mystery, melancholy.
Most of these paintings aren’t about the hyperrealism for which this artist has by-now become known. The almost-blackness of them, which at first dismayed me, brings an alternate form of translation. While not quite the Inuits and their 50+ words for snow and its whitenesses, the blacks and almost blacks of the artist, mediated by his sodium hues of yellow/ brown/ dirty grey blues, privilege psycho-emotional atmosphere. Sometimes, this profound nerve-ending atmosphere veers toward the archaeological, as with the lane paintings, ‘Harbour’ and ‘Harbour 2’ or with the entrance canopy to Crumlin Shopping Centre, ‘Crumlin’. Harbour Lane is not in Inchicore or its hinterland. It’s a lane off the city’s main street, O’Connell Street. Due to its notoriety – a no-go shooting gallery – it has been shut off by the City Fathers. The artist tells me about his former studio there, and how he had admired the lane, its light and scale, its textures. But now, he finds it inaccessible. Urban loss. Urban obsolescence. Crumlin Shopping Centre was opened in 1974, as one of many contemporary suburban malls around Dublin and in 2010, its closure began. Demolition proposed. The artist’s translation of this loss is a symmetrical composition; lots of daytime sky, lots of concrete and an exuberant (maybe late-1980s) high-tech curved canopy. Shopfront scenography.
It’s important that the artist used to go to that shopping centre as a child. In its brightness, the painting is not emotional but it is biographical and it could be nostalgic. Loss is perceptible.
Before I leave the artist and his studio, I spend a good while looking at his four house paintings: ‘Hall’; ‘Kitchen’; ‘Newel’; ‘Front Door’. I can’t get enough of them. They are unsettling - uncanny - in their familiarity. They are exquisite in how they disclose domestic details, in all their banality and beauty. These four paintings, the artist tells me, signal a departure. They take him indoors; if not completely, then partially and with a view to the indoors. Perhaps spurred on by his mother’s recent passing, he has brought us, me, to his family home. Nerve endings fizzle and the uncanny has been achieved. It is a twilight time and the detritus of family life is everywhere in evidence. There is complete stillness and there is undoubted absence, but somehow, through the artist’s tender eye and measured ways, it is never ominous.
I must go now. I’ve been here too long and I’ve other jobs to do in the city. The artist shows me his steel frames which he makes himself in his brother’s small foundry. He tells me that he will put each painting in a steel frame. I marvel at his skill and am not surprised that he can do this. He is a craftsman. Later, by correspondence, the artist outlines the plan for the walls of the gallery. So, I see that he is also a curator. Nothing is left to chance – such is the care taken here.
Dr Ellen Rowley,
Architectural + Cultural Historian, Lecturer in Modern Irish Architecture, University College Dublin,
February – March, 2026
