Experiments with Reality

Conor Walton

Saturday 12th April to Saturday 17th May 2025

“…I try to 'dance along the cultural fault-line', presenting complex narratives that may be interpreted in opposite ways, depending upon the viewer's perspective. My intention is in part to present the intelligent viewer, aware of contrary interpretive possibilities, with questions and dilemmas: Which interpretation to choose? Whose side am I on? Am I joking or serious? Am I crazy or sane? Is this satire or paranoid fantasy?  My hope is that the intelligent viewer, aware that different interpretive possibilities cannot be removed, that the picture cannot thus be easily used as propaganda by either side, or easily disarmed and rendered innocuous, is led towards a more complex and nuanced negotiation with the image. The viewer's own interpretative responsibilities must be acknowledged. The implicit threat to the viewer's interpretation and supporting worldview remains. 

I know in presenting such complex work dealing with controversial and politically charged topics I'm making serious demands on my viewers' tolerance and sophistication. I risk being identified with the enemy and denounced by both sides.

I think the potential reward for taking this risk is work with deep cultural resonance that tackles the serious issues of our day and cannot easily be ignored or forgotten, even by those who dislike it. In an age of crisis and revolutionary politics, the imaginative arts typically acquire renewed force and vigour and command our attention because they can reveal what is going on deep in our collective psyche and beneath the surface of our culture, especially when authority proves weak, fallible and deluded. What we find in the depths can and perhaps should be shocking to any civilised, reasonable observer sensitive enough to read the signs. I can vouch for this. I, too, see the madness in my work, and in my times.” - Conor Walton Essay on Asymmetrical Warfare

Appraisals of the work of Conor Walton

"Conor Walton is making important paintings. These are my kind of masterpieces." - Donald Kuspit (Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University 1991-97, Senior Critic at the New York Academy of Art)

“These paintings are exquisite, not simply for their masterful technique but for their intriguing and provocative content as well. This is the art that is destined to shift the paradigm for artistic canon in the 21st century. It takes more than virtuous craftsmanship, it takes well informed innovative ideas to make great artworks. Conor is just the type of innovative thinker we need to take fine art where it must to go for the future. His artwork is insightful, philosophically astute, beautifully rendered and culturally relevant in the contemporary era. Conor's paintings are politically conscious without falling into the pitfalls of propaganda or sanctimony. Finally, a talented representational painter who actually comprehends 20th century art history, knows how to deploy it without glib appropriations and who can create work that is neither cliché nor derivative. Salute to Conor Walton, a painter for the ages!”
- Joseph Bravo (art-historian, critic, curator, Director of the Centro de Artes, Texas A&M University, San Antonio, USA).

"Peremptory satire ages fast on the hurried stage of global politics, but because Walton’s burlesques are clad in the finery of brilliant execution, they are destined for long lives as fine examples of the cutting sharpness of the best of 21st century representational art."
- Michael Pearce (artist, writer, critic, curator, Professor of Figurative Drawing and Painting at California Lutheran University)

"Because of his ability to generate dramas of ideas and to paint them masterfully, Walton’s paintings are hard to look away from. Opposing easy optimism, they offer a vision grounded in realism and cathartic tragedy."
- John Seed (writer, curator, Professor of Art and Art History at Mount San Jacinto College, California)

"Concentration of thought, paralleled by dedication to skill in composition and the application of paint, was central to the development of Conor Walton's output during these years ... and led to his outstanding, and outstandingly successful, solo exhibition in March 1999 in Dublin. I spoke about him on that occasion, warmly commending the intensity of his vision, the intellectual authority of his conception, and the richness of his output. He is loaded with promise, burdened with an excess of what, in the seventeenth century, was a term of admiration - conceit."
- Bruce Arnold (writer, critic and art-historian)

"Walton, who studied in Florence and enjoys an international reputation, is steeped in the classical tradition, has perfected the grand style but he is also a thoroughly modern artist; the work is informed by a contemporary intellectual sensibility."
- Niall MacMonagle (critic, Sunday Independent)

"Dublin-born Conor Walton is a prodigious talent ... His extraordinary draughtsmanship and mastery of chiaroscuro, allied to his affinity for colour and composition undoubtedly makes him one of Europe's top contemporary artists."
- New Museum Los Gatos, USA

"It would be a mistake simply to view Conor Walton as an artist with exceptional skills who makes fine pictures. Conor is a person of strong opinions, someone with a lot to say, and he uses his art practice to capture, critique and present contemporary social issues to the public. Nevertheless, even if his pictures obviously refer to contemporary events, he remains determined that they are not reducible to mere propaganda. He wants his work not only to be accessible to a wide audience, but also to challenge viewers as to whether their own opinions are being endorsed or mocked. He describes this ambiguity as 'dancing along cultural faultlines'. As it happens, I believe that the kind of realist paintings that Conor paints are perfect vehicles for this sort of ambiguity."
- Robert Ballagh, leading Irish artist and designer, guest speaker at the opening of Conor Walton: 'Asymmetrical Warfare', Luan Gallery, August 17th 2019.

"In effect, his painting is a profound investigation into past human events and contemporary developments. The artist presents an oeuvre of great formal balance that draws expressive force from the European figurative tradition, compositional harmony, technical rigor. An attentive observer of the social system, he inserts himself with courage and feeling into the dynamics of contemporary society, searching for answers to doubts and problems."
- Paolo Giansiracusa (art historian and curator)

"Mr 'Painter' is, all at once, outstanding in his studio, far reaching in his micro-ness, future proofing in his classical adherence, vivid in his undertone-ing-ness. Indeed, as Churchill once misquoted; 'A griddle wrapped in mastery inside of a magma!' In short; his work is tomorrow's fish wrapped in yesterday's newspaper."
- Milo O'Gorman, Wordwaffler's Chronicle Digest.