Oil paint can be insubordinate. Its misbehaviour can be a recipe for chaos, but this contingency can also invite spontaneity and unpredictability. Lucienne O’Mara welcomes a little chaos, or perhaps more accurately, she is open to the structural animation that accompanies the material’s volatility.

The discord that colour can arouse before it coheres compositionally, finds new structures, new resolutions in the semi-relaxed architecture that O’Mara establishes. To date O’Mara’s colours simultaneously celebrate dissonance and accord, and this liveliness contributes to the joyful friction that enlivens the paintings.

O’Mara favours a broad brush, one that braids the cocktail of pigments into a lengthy linear weave. The colours inevitably cross pollinate – submerged layers become evident as the threads created by her robust action and the tooth of the brushes cause the linear threads to coalesce into a new blended fabric. It is as if the brush tills the surface of the painting…

The mix of authority and composure when using such demonstrably large gestures has precedence in painters such as Pierre Soulage & Sean Scully. Soulage stylising the robust calligraphy of Franz Kline, Scully adopting the blockier compositional gymnastics of Morandi, albeit at grand scale.

O’Mara’s newest paintings are also grand in scale and load even further responsibility on the efficacy of her gesture and the increasingly nuanced adjustments in tone. In this sense they are considerably closer to Scully’s absorption of Morandi than they are to Soulages’s stylised gesture. Morandi was an exceptional tonal painter, using subtle modulations to open and animate the complex architecture of his compositions. In this new body of work O’Mara is reducing the breadth of colours, relying less on her earlier punchy chromatic juxtapositions and more on a subtle shifts in weight and luminosity.