A wound? gash? accident? on an otherwise bespoke piece of gallery furniture, Tanad Aaron's DEAR X, a platform? stage? sculpture? flaps open like an envelope, territorially stretching its brown breadth to leave a gutter between its exactitude and the Complex's crumbling tolerance. It suns its leathery terrain beneath Mark Swords' paintings, Mediterranean ruins in fantasy and flirtation, more Pompeii and Herculaneum than grey fruit-market Dublin. Tanad Aaron's wound? gash? accident? – and I mean those nouns in the personal (artist) and impersonal (artwork) – does that thing that Shakespeare wrote about in that catchy line from Hamlet, catch the conscience of the King – the “King” being the outwardly passive and uniform ruler of the people's exposed and unruly conscience. Up to noticing Tanad Aaron's cut, Mark Swords' paintings were arbours to dreaming and desiring with their don't-touch-only-look relationship with the viewer, whereas Tanad Aaron's platform underfoot carried you through the space by the toes. Except for that negative slice in the fabric of Tanad Aaron's uniform skin, a skin flayed of the excesses of mind, body, and music like Greek Marsyas was, Mark Swords' paintings are noise to Tanad Aaron's whispering, excess to negation. And it is negation that Tanad Aaron uses for this isolated cut, what a painter might call ‘mark making’ or philosopher ‘subjectivity’. Like the ironic need to substitute ‘excessive’ with ‘superfluous’ we can criticise this wound? gash? accident? as being just that; as if the artist were not comfortable in his own skin, or became increasingly frustrated with the closed and uniform canvas of his medium of lacquered and sandpaper-massaged MDF, and responded in kind with cruelty, like Lucio Fontana did when he stabbed his own paintings, or Edvard Munch when he whipped them. This gash disturbs the surface of Tanad Aaron's cheap luxury, a tanned pauper in King's garb, like Holbein did in his otherwise boring Ambassadors with its anamorphic skull, another symbol of negation. Tanad Aaron's cut disturbs the flow, the foot traffic, the imagination. Subjectivity is best found in the folds of normalcy, like desire in absence, or the fetish where love is not. The cut opens up a narrative that, up to discovering it, slid up, across and down the artwork’s mellow back like water or light. It is strange to think of excess as negation but Tanad Aaron, with a circular saw and held breath, has transformed excess into just that, negation. Perhaps, under the influence of Mark Swords, kneeling under vs standing over, an artist who shouts loudest here in his fretwork and patchwork of visual metaphor and material metonymy, Tanad Aaron felt the need to open his closed form and place a light inside that peeks through with intent and individuality (minus previous collaborators Tom Watt and Andreas Kindler von Knobloch and present collaborator? Mark Swords in tow). An addition that works in subtraction, the platform now breathes whereas before it suffocated under the collage and raw excesses of Mark Swords' dissected skins and smoke rings. Is this where the collaboration begins, in the last act of a circular saw? It does for me. Because there is so much difference here that the glibness of “opposites attract” just doesn't cut… anything. Walls and floors, vertical and horizontal, collaborator and painter, Tanad Aaron and Mark Swords abut each other but don't bully beyond their own solipsism. There is a distance between these two artists, one messy, the other neat, one proffering, the other in retreat, illustrated in the delineation and demarcation of their differing enterprises. They may have conversed over the last two years but those shared words hang in speech bubbles at the Complex. Here the two artists breathe their own air and swallow their own spit. One Mark Swords seems to sit on Tanad Aaron but it is an illusion; while another Mark Swords is propped on a stack of tiles balanced on the floor proper, not Tanad Aaron proper. Yes, they have collaborated on a screen at the entrance, something that seems excessive in its literalness, wherein Mark Swords brings the found fruit-sack skin and Tanad Aaron the institutional framing to the gang bang, but it feels like an obligatory, excessive, superfluous statement, an artist statement that spoils the gap between art's glorious abstraction and the artist's need to communicate? I am using a volley of question marks that may straighten and stab or spring with possibility because this exhibition is curious in a time of strange sociability, when and where gaps define our existence. Perhaps the present climate in more ways than one (or two) is akin to the gap in this two-person show, an exhibition that day dreams while treadmilling our transformed sociability?

Go.

Through 28 May.