Shane Berkery

The Irish-Japanese artist talks to REBECCA BRADBURY about the innovative concepts and original colour combinations he brings to his figurative oil paintings from his Dublin garden studio

- REBECCA BRADBURY

A Light was based upon an informal photo of two of the artist's friends From Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus to The Dream by Pablo Picasso, great artists have been painting slumbering subjects for centuries, but there is still something wholly original about Shane Berkery’s offering to the tradition, Salvatore of Lucan.

Surreal and subliminal, the oil painting depicts a figure fused with the rural landscape in which he sleeps. The green, grassy terrain is one and the same as his jacket, which clothes a torso of clouds and four lifelike arms, at the end of which one hand holds a lit cigarette. Topping off this fantastical vision is a handsome face in repose, rendered with a dreamy, delicate realism.

The Tokyo-born, Dublin-based artist intended to simply paint his friend, Salvatore, but the concept soon grew to encompass themes of identity and belonging. “My friend is also biracial,” Shane explains of his half-Bangladeshi, half-Irish subject. “He gets the question, ‘Where are you from? No, where are you really from?’, a lot and his answer is always: Lucan. It’s just a place in Dublin and it doesn’t actually look like [the painting], but I wanted to integrate Salvatore into the landscape to show that Lucan is part of his identity.”