Analysis Of Canning's Mavro And Black Mirror I

If to discover the origin of the work in a “normal” artwork, to grasp its createdness we must investigate the “creative” activity of the artist, then in Canning’s “Mavro” (Fig 4-25, 2012) and “Black mirror I” (Fig 4-26, 2012) we must do the opposite, try to understand their unmaking.
Under what Heidegger calls purely workly terms (Heidegger 1950, 34) and dispelling all notions of context and rhetoric, these paintings, despite appearances, are not really distinct from Canning’s other work, they’re landscapes painted in his usual manner. What distinguishes them, however, is his final decision to cover them with an opaque black veil. Unlike the mixture utilised by Canning in the final skimming of other works, this pigment is not translucent, rather
If a mirror is a thing made to reflect an image, “Black Mirror I” does the opposite. Instead of being an object which allows for specular reflection, the act in which a light ray originating from a single incoming direction is reflected back out in a single outgoing direction, returning a perfect reflection, “Black Mirror I” absorbs all light entering it, much like Bacon’s opaque mirrors with their “black thickness” (Deleuze 1981, 18). This is a kind of abyss like a black hole in space, a dark dense void that takes in all radiance and emits nothing in
This work is a representation of things which Canning had experienced in his past – the mirror, the miniature genre of portrait painting and its cameo format, the oval mount in a frame, or the image of the sacred heart present in Catholic Irish households during the 1970s and 80s; but it also prefigures future phases of Canning’s work. If the positions of the image and the blackness were inverted, a vignette effect remains which we observe Canning beginning to incorporate into his works circa 2015, influenced by his interest in filters in the “Instagram” App. All of these various “blackness” are an encroachment of the abyss onto the sensible world (Heidegger 1950,