Fergal Styles

Fergal Styles’s practise is centred around drawing and painting. Nominally a figurative painter, he employs a wide variety of media to create images specific in detail, but that feel abstract in aggregate. In his seeming adherence to the traditional categories of figurative painting, we are presented with a world that appears bizarrely normal. There are reoccurring motifs aplenty, of cats, dogs, potted plants, and domestic interiors, yet his use of materials and approach to subject matter is playful and irreverent, giving far more weight to feeling through the materials, rather than bowing before trivial facts. His compositions evolve intuitively with each passage of paint, or layer of collage, responding to the last. It is a vision of the world appears, intensely saturated, emotional, intimate and even still mysterious.

‘’Styles paints the domestic, exploring the internal human experience within the context of (his) interior … offering an alternative narrative where, in solitude, we take time to make, remember, and travel towards ourselves.’’ – Neva Elliot.