A new form of beauty

Guggi still gets asked about his rock’n’roll past, but it’s his art that occupies him now, writes Alan O’Riordan

ON A stormy Dublin afternoon, the stillness of the Kerlin Gallery is amplified: a calm space in which to contemplate both the beautiful and the mundane. Or, rather, the mundane made beautiful. Guggi’s new exhibition is full of the familiar still-life images that have become almost a trademark: simple shapes of bowls and jugs, taken out of everyday settings and transformed into symbols.

While the viewer may ponder the universal associations of a jug transformed into art, for the painter, the meaning is more personal. “These old jugs, my grandmother had them on a shelf in her kitchen,” he says in his rich and raspy voice, pointing to one of the paintings. “I just saw these jugs as the ugliest things. They weren’t made to be beautiful. I hated the design: it was dark, it was of the past. But then I started collecting a couple because I began seeing them as something beautiful. It just becomes part of one’s vocabulary. It’s what words are to a poet, it’s just my vocabulary.