Bare of people, and eschewing the well known tours of architectural highlights, Eithne Jordan’s paintings focus on the contemporary urban enviromnent – factory roofs, subway tunnels, underpasses, apartment blocks , car parks and housing estates – the familiar yet often forgotten sites in cities such as Paris, Rotterdam, Berlin, Vienna, and most recently Dublin. She uses photography as an integral part of the process of generating the imagery, taking hundreds of photographs on working trips to various cities. Her eye is that of a brief passer-by, an outsider looking in. Back in the studio decisions about the imagery and the composition are then made through a process of selecting and remembering, leading to the small gouaches and later the oil paintings. Jordan narrates cities that are at once familiar yet hauntingly strange. Within the spaces depicted, although evidence of human habitation is everywhere -as in a lit window or a passing car- an explicit human presence is rare, so that there is a melancholy vacancy to to most of the scenes. This is accentuated by her treatment of the nuances of light and weather: the darkness of a February afternoon, the reflected light of a fresh snowfall, or the distictive hue of halogen street lights. There is always a suggested possibility of narrative, and the paintings are pregnant with action that is either to come, or else is taking place just out of view. What is revealed is an an intimate portrait of a city left for a moment to be simply itself.
