JOE HARGAN PAI PPAI RGI : THE WEE PICTURE
Joe Hargan returns with his tongue-in-cheek ‘Sniffy’ paintings – masterfully colourful paintings featuring the ‘sniffy’ rotund butler within gallery and stately home settings, always surrounded by old masters and an air of the ridiculous. Not only finely executed, these paintings offer humorous and sometimes surreal vignettes of the good life – wine flows and there is always cake, as we are treated to a painting within a painting, a Canaletto or a John Singer Sargent from the end of Joe’s brush. There is always a little more than meets the eye however, and these ‘Sniffy’ paintings are a commentary of sorts, with Joe’s playful juxtapositions of the traditional and the modern raising questions about the value of contemporary art, and his humorous ‘vignettes’ providing us with a visual picture of some of the debates that take place in the strange and wonderful place that is the art world today. Even with all of its challenges and contradictions – and perhaps because of them – it is Joe’s world, the place he has inhabited creatively for decades and the source of his inspiration.