Dermot Seymour
Des Bêtes et des Hommes

The work of Northern Irish artist Dermot Seymour presents a unique vision of the socio-political situation in Ireland and the turbulent decades of the Troubles. His iconography, stark and often on the verge of the surreal, assaults the viewer’s subconscious leaving an indelible trace. A preoccupation with the relationship between man and beast harks back to eighth-century Irish nature poetry and has a distant yet clear affinity with the illuminations of the Book of Kells. In Seymour’s paintings, this relationship becomes part of a coded commentary on Irish society, where the past is not a faded memory but a force that informs everyday reality.