GALLERIES • WEEKEND Too Big for His Pond: The Irish Abstract Painter John Cronin by John Yau on July 7, 2013 2 John Cronin, “Standard Deviation” (2012), oil on aluminium, 60 x 120 x 3 cm (all images courtesy the artist and Red on Green Gallery, Dublin) 1. DUBLIN — John Cronin, an abstract painter in his late 40s, who has been exhibiting his work regularly in Ireland since the late 1980s, was — for this viewer — a wonderful revelation. Little known in America, it was clear from the moment that I walked into the high-ceilinged gallery space that Cronin was up to something. The most obvious is a preoccupation with the nature of paint’s materiality, and beyond that, with the status of painting at this late point in history. Instead of choosing the path of solutions and a signature style, he has elected the territory of investigation and discovery. Rejecting the commonplace answers of parody and citation, he focuses on the how and...