ARTIST STATEMENT.

Dublin painter Roger O’Neill creates semi-representational paintings that form almost landscapes — spaces where geometric forms and structures emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure within layers of texture and material. His works hover between abstraction and architecture, combining painted elements with constructed objects assembled and welded from materials directly sourced from Dublin City — fragments collected, stored, and archived over time. These physical remnants of place anchor the work in lived reality, even as the imagery drifts toward the abstract.

O’Neill’s paintings embrace process as both subject and method. Their layered, tactile surfaces are scraped, rebuilt, and eroded, revealing traces of time and touch. Earth tones collide with vivid, electric color; form collapses into texture; chaos yields fleeting structure. Each piece physically embodies its own making, becoming a record of transformation — an act of construction and deconstruction within itself.

Through this raw materiality, O’Neill finds comfort in dereliction, discovering beauty in weathered surfaces and fractured geometries. His paintings feel excavated, like urban ruins shaped by memory and motion, where decay gives rise to quiet renewal. In them, paint becomes substance, surface becomes story, and the city itself becomes both subject and source — a living archive of persistence, loss, and change.

Roger is currently exhibiting a new body of work in AXIS Arts centre Ballymun in a group show with Interrupted Collective.SYSTEMS October 31st 2025 until 31st January 2026

Reviews

Aidan Dunne.

Irish Times

Art review:  Ramp – Roger O’Neill   

The Complex

★★★★

Tue, Mar 8, 2016, 06:00 Updated: Tue, Mar 8, 2016, 10:46

“O’Neill’s mixed-media works in Ramp are not directly representational, but they suggest an interest in the immediate, urban terrain, from inner-city locations and communities to vacant sites and the city’s coastal fringe, opening out on to Dublin Bay. There is a restless, mutable, bricolage quality to the richly textured compositions, an acceptance that change and the necessity for improvisation are non- negotiable.

O’Neill favours gritty textures with occasional bursts of unexpected radiance and calm. The works are a good reflection of urban life and, you could say, creative life in the inner city”.