Aiden Dunn | The Irish Times
James Fisher's richly-coloured paintings present us with deceptive surfaces. Appropriated imagery is infiltrated into layer upon layer of decorative patterning - or vice versa. The basic effect is to make us question what we are looking at as the illusion of the picture surface gives way no matter which way we try to read it. Having been diverted, however, we are endlessly entertained by Fisher's juxtapositions of line, pattern and colour.
Martin Holman | In the Spirit of the Original
Fisher is a painter who knows better than to be hurried. An adherent to the magic in mixing raw materials with invention to create a parallel world, he loathes the idea that the conjuror should ever explain his tricks. He is conscious that ‘art’ has acquired over millennia its transfixing ability to transform experience with the orchestration of numerous plottings and decisions, attempts and changes, victories and defeats. Reality is a fabrication that interweaves with the world of imagined phenomena, and both acquire their meaning from that relativity.