Molten Meat Puppets.
Brendan Flanagan's new paintings concentrate on moments which are peripheral. The action always seems to be taking place off to the side. His figures stand like the stage hands of a Greek tragedy, forced to watch the heroic actor walk off the stage to have his eyes gouged out or his entrails eviscerated. Bored, inured, perhaps even shocked: it's impossible to say with the lumpen impersonators that feature in his works. Standing or straddling, they are stuck in a motion whose resolution might never salvage it from the absurdity they are currently stranded in. As such, they document the ambiance of an event rendered into material form. They are not tracings of the sensation of these mysterious and unknowable events, nor are they their echoing.
