Having noticed bits and pieces of O’Donoghue’s work at the Fitzwilliam, I was interested to see what this exhibition would have to offer. Arriving at Trinity Hall, the porters didn’t seem to know whether or not I could even look at it (“It does say Sunday on the poster, maybe you should let him in”). This is a secret show.

Why the college would be tempted to keep this exhibition under wraps is beyond me: Excavations encompasses a wide range of O’Donoghue’s very recent work, and it’s powerful stuff.

The smaller paintings were, at first, the most interesting. Masterly, brief essays in texture and composition, they present O’Donoghue’s oil painting at its purest. With their generally russet hue, there is something effortlessly threatening about them.

The larger pictures were more challenging, maybe due to their scale, maybe due to the presence of something melodramatic or romantic in their orientation. These pictures have, at their centre, a photographic element, leading to a sense of figurative certainty. ‘Memory of the House’ is an image bordering on cliché.

That said, it’s in these larger pictures that the depth of O’Donoghue’s artistic project is properly found, in all its symbolic richness. The human bodies left lying in two of the large images are obviously mortal. The woman in ‘Raft’ is sent out into the waves like a burnt offering. Similarly, the male figure in ‘The Measure of all Things’ lays Christ-like, the Vitruvian man laid flat.

At this point it became clear how the larger pictures related to their smaller counterparts. The larger images relied on a certain visual objectivity – created through the use of photography – but this is engulfed by O’Donoghue’s corrosive paint.

The figures in O’Donoghue’s paintings are not as much ‘excavated’ as enveloped. His work here focuses on the messy and often destructive act of memorialisation. Paint becomes the antithesis to everything photographically tangible; it is the morass, the waves and smoke of coursing obliteration.

“The waves,” to quote Woolf, “massed themselves, curved their backs, and crashed.” Memories become enswathed in a caked mass of subjectivity.