In these meditations O'Kane appears to query ideas of space, connectivity and engagement with society and the environment that are suggested in the paintings. It also brings forth ideas of the aestheticized space, the artist removed, alone. As the Irish Times critic Aidan Dunne commented “ the remote, at times forbidding settings of these prototypical studios also raise the question of whether the artist is better placed in an ivory tower or in the midst of social space”. These forms of engagement concern and perplex him – he employs an act of visual description using the traditional artistic tools, the quasi direct drawing and painting approach with its lineage of apparent perceptual honesty and responsiveness wrapped in the non-sureness of artistic subjectivity side-by-side with the post-modern awareness of the complexity and compromised nature of visual representation.
Mike Fitzpatrick