Eddie Cahill "Heads VII" Mixed media on paper — Eddie Cahill “Heads VII” Mixed media on paper

HEADS VIII

At The Origin Gallery, 15th October – 14th November 2015

EDDIE CAHILL is a self-taught Dublin based artist. He has had considerable success exhibiting in Northern Ireland and abroad but it is only now that he has worked towards a solo exhibition in Dublin, his native city.

His work is concerned with social and human conditions and references deep memories of family, living and dead. Aidan Dunne of THE IRISH TIMES has in the past said of his portraits:“They move inwards instead of out, the head itself is turned inside out, the magic box of tricks opens to reveal a dark, intense realm, a world stranger than we might have imagined, but also strangely familiar.”

Eddie took part in an RTE documentary last year entitled “Outsider” tracing his colourful life story from childhood and social isolation through to prison and his cathartic change to becoming a dedicated artist. Brian Maguire who references Eddie’s dark and insightful vision of humanity as the real force of his work said on the documentary that Cahill was by far the best product of the Art in Prison Arts Programme which he ran whilst Head of Painting at NCAD.

In Portlaoise Prison the lights go out at 10pm, leaving the prisoners in the dark… “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” says Eddie Cahill

A back catalogue critique speaks of Eddie Cahill as coming to paint with, as Dubuffet might say, ‘an untutored eye’. His paintings are unmediated, direct. He uses paint emotively, even, as is true of many expressionist painters, self-indulgently.
His technique is unadorned – he draws roughly, compositions have an ad hoc air – but he does have a feeling for paint, for form and for colour, and each work develops in a natural, organic way. He also sustains real intensities of feeling, to the extent that everything in the paintings is subservient to feeling. Yet he holds onto a vision in making each picture and he is remarkably successful in conjuring up a consistent personal world.”
At age 13, the teenager Eddie with his brother ran away and were sent to Letterfrack Industrial School.