Vigo Gallery is delighted to announce Alone Together, Lucienne O'Mara's debut show with the gallery.
In 2017, a car accident left O'Mara with a brain injury that fundamentally altered her relationship with vision. She lost all spatial awareness and the ability to process visual information - even the simple act of identifying the floor became impossible. "It was as if I couldn't understand the language of visual understanding," she recalls. During extended periods of bed rest, she began meticulously cataloguing images of artworks, particularly drawn to Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings, where objects simultaneously assert and dissolve their boundaries to create depth. This systematic study became her method of reconstructing visual understanding, revealing how perception is as much a function of the brain as it is of the eyes - each new visual experience is inherently shaped by every image that preceded it.
The show's title, Alone Together, emerges from the dualities central to O'Mara's practice. This oxymoron reflects both her experience of prolonged diagnostic uncertainty and the opposing forces at play in her paintings - chaos meeting order, definition dissolving into ambiguity. "It's impossible for anything to stand alone because when you see something, it's connected and affected by everything you've seen before," she explains. Doctors struggled to diagnose her condition for nearly five years, a period of perpetual misunderstanding that paradoxically enriched her artistic approach, teaching her that uncertainty could be transformed from limitation into creative possibility.
O'Mara's paintings reject linear time and fixed spatial relationships in favour of simultaneous moments and fluid boundaries. Her work operates through a series of grid formations that simultaneously impose structure whilst fostering chaos. Her paintings present multiple temporal and perceptual planes at once, allowing viewers to move freely between states of understanding and ambiguity. Depth and form remain deliberately fluid, the rules of perception productively broken, and the conventional order of vision dissolving into something more intuitive and emotionally resonant. This ambiguity becomes not merely an artistic choice but a gateway to a more liberated form of seeing, one where the boundaries between object and space, moment and memory, continually shift and reform.
