In an art world dominated for decades by conceptual work, painting continues to exert a fascination. And what is more quintessentially painterly than landscape? Yet, taking the historical view, landscape is a relatively recent development, having leapt from the background of religious and genre paintings to become the main object of the artist's attention only in the 18th century, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace. Painters' fascination with landscape is bound up with our growing distance from it in the modern world, so it is refreshing to find a group of young artists at a fashionable gallery exploring ways in which landscape can interact with modernity " either in the subject matter, its treatment, or both.
Eamon O'Kane's paintings place the angular forms of modern houses in woodland settings. The buildings are not merely modern: they are bold statements of Modernism. (One, seen through a spring-green haze, is actually Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Pennsylvania.) Electric light spills out into the wooded depths, and although humans are absent, the paintings suggest the playing out of some enigmatic human narrative.
Chris Schuler, The Independent, 2005