by Mark O’Byrne, Gold Core:

The art world and artists have in the main not addressed one of the most important issues of our time – central banks foisting debt on the people and nations of the world and thereby controlling them.

An artist who has the knowledge and courage to look at and address the world of money, the dangers of monetary policies today and currency debasement on a scale that the world has never seen before is an Irish artist called Conor Walton.

This phrase sums up my entire career, but it has particular relevance to this current series of works because they deal explicitly with cultural conflict, with the crises of our times – political, ecological, financial, cultural and moral – and the warped perspectives that ensue.

These paintings represent a cultural battlefield. For me, they are a way of waging a small-scale war against modernity.

About twenty years ago, in my late twenties, I came to the conclusion that I really didn’t understand how the world worked: so much of what was going on made very little sense to me, particularly in the spheres of markets and finance.

So I went ‘back to school’ and tried to fill in the gaps in my understanding and overhaul my world-view. I emerged from that overhaul a ‘Doomer’.

Being a ‘Doomer’ is often cast in very negative terms, but I quickly discovered the positive side.

For a start, a couple of well-timed investments through GoldCore made me money. But, more importantly, I found my sense of artistic vocation renewed: my job as a painter is now to show what I think is really going on in the world, to document our times in all their craziness.

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