The city is a particle accelerator, a vast experiment, endlessly generating chance and clutter. In its relentless promise of more and better excitement, its hectic pursuit of the unreachable now, it resembles nothing so much as a streaming service for everyday life, affording the illusion of endless choice but – more often than not – delivering a paralysing boredom.

The works that Joe O’Rourke has brought together in his Disc Unknown exhibition at Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery often read like salvage from that urban churn, rescued from an almost instantaneous entropy in order to exhale their near-exhausted meaning. It was, in fact, preceded by a first iteration in a second city – hosted by London’s Pipeline – from which it has been remade and remodelled for Castlefield’s rather different interior.

Named after a series of DVD cases that the Situationists would say have been detourned – stripped of their original imagery and straplines to be reclothed in something more revealing – these are the pieces that usher the visitor into O’Rourke’s world. Their semi-obsolete format, their charity shop cheapness, serves as an apt metaphor for capitalism’s cycle of rapidly degrading value, corroded both by fashion’s kiss chase with the cutting edge and the calculated half-life of planned obsolescence. Frequently, they’re funny, like cartoons from the New Yorker, inscribed or pasted onto transparent plastic.

Indeed, humour – typically manifesting in his keen eye for absurdity – is as much one of O’Rourke’s working materials as oil or canvas. Straggling along and across the gallery’s two-floor wall, one of his larger works embeds itself in the white concrete like some tenacious hybrid of ivy and graffiti. O’Rourke is on the record as saying that he is intent on “leaving space for the painting to collect meaning”, and this is literally the case here, as lacunae of negative space intersperse an assemblage whose ramshackle provisionality seems a hair-trigger away from catastrophe. The impression is reinforced by his choice of words and pictures. Packaging tape that warns of ‘fragile circumstances’ does little to reassure when strewn beneath the non-functional photograph of a smoke alarm, ominously combustible and wholly ineffectual.

In a week during which Dove Stone in the Peak District continued to smoulder, O’Rourke’s unease at our flammable times is echoed in his Panic. A butterfly caught in drying paint suggests the absence of escape routes, as brush-stroked scorch marks and the image of a skyline painted into a matchbox serve as a premonition of fires yet to catch light on the streets of Dublin, Dundee and Humberside.

Somethin’ Ain’t Right, meanwhile, offers a cityscape in Cinemascope. Taking multiple vantage points, panning in and out, it fractures the urban narrative like broken glass from a vandalised bus shelter.  Wayward text, complaining of an ‘annoying advert’, seems to question the rights of authorship over its bloated swell and sprawl , while empty billboards and blank blueprint paper feel like invitations to the viewer to take up marker pens and spray cans for themselves.

For all that these larger pieces, like James Joyce’s prose in Ulysses, reward a closer reading, I was most won over by the comparative directness of O’Rourke’s All Points. Simple in composition, like a flag for a quieter territory, the painting – in which a still night surmounts an empty daytime bench – gives the viewer pause from the clangour of its companion pieces while harking back to O’Rourke’s earlier paper-penned works, such as A Man Angry At Strangers Not Wearing Poppies.

In the end, the strength of O’Rourke’s work is that it makes you think. Its surface accessibility, undoubtedly part of its charm, is also somewhat deceptive. More often than not, each stratum of every collage suggests a fresh layer of meaning. Scratching at the itch of the algorithm-conditioned product bulimia of climate crisis capitalism, while snatching still lives from the city’s insistence on itself, his art effectively pops the balloons at their party.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Installation View of Disc Unknown, Solo Exhibition by Joe O’Rourke at Castlefield Gallery. Courtesy of Jules Lister.

 

Disc Unknown by Joe O’Rourke is at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester until August 30, 2026. For more information, click here.