New Series of Sapphire Blue Paintings by Danny Rolph at Poppy Sebire
LONDON.- For his first show at Poppy Sebire, Danny Rolph presents a new series of sapphire blue backed triplewall paintings. These new works are a continuation of Rolph’s investigation into his discourse with space. They are taking on a more direct relationship with painting’s topology. The deep blue plastic ground upon which the actions occur offer up an infinite recessional space that resembles the night sky. This blue ground is where Rolph performs his analysis on forms and on colours and their ensuing drama.
Rolph’s approach to each painting’s composition has as its starting point the horizontal lines of the triplewall material; the lined structure establishes a calm to the basic plane. Rolph effects his universe of information through collage, mixed media and paint on three layers, like a musician would plot his musical score.
- Danny Rolph, Salisbury, 2009 Mixed media on Triplewall 150 x 210 cm
Reclaimed magazine cuttings of London buses and pages from colouring-in books of power rangers are some of the collaged elements that make up Bonar Law. Bright vinyl fragments and decorative cardboard cutouts are nailed to the surface. The recurring theme of antiquated forms of transport in this painting are an intentional direct reference to motion. Scrap images of old-fashioned aircraft are paradoxically trapped in a static moment of stillness within the painting’s layers.
In Lloyd George we see a photograph of the teenage Rolph, early cut-up private view cards from the artist’s previous shows, pages from catalogues of antique vases and elaborate period interiors. This collaged element migrated from his works on paper onto the triplewalls in recent years. Rolph is a cultural magpie with a hunger for popular and recent histories, including his own.
For the viewer, the experience is participatory, purely subjective and phenomenological. The forms and colours of continual movement provoke a joyful impression, which act on the viewer’s own living sensibility. These works are pulling all the fragments of existence together in a chaotic state of suspense, for a moment, without volume.
These recent paintings possess more of a dissonant quality accentuated through marks that have a clearer association with forces such as motion, velocity and acceleration and are at odds with the quasi-architectonic structures that they circumnavigate, disassembling and reconstructing them on the same plane. Fragmentary combinations that appear all over the work build a psychological pleasure that pushes and pulls a viewer across the surface allowing for transgressive impulses describing the impossibility of our existence in the world.
Danny Rolph lives and works in London. He studied at Winchester School of Art 1988-91 and the Royal College of Art 1991 – 93. He received a Delfina Trust Award 1994-96, an Abbey Scholarship, British School of Rome 1998, and a London Arts Visual Art Award 2001. Rolph has works in the Tate Collection and the Metropolitan Museum in New York as well as important private UK and international collections. He was recently made Visiting Professor of Fine Art at Bucks New University. He teaches at the Royal Academy Schools amongst other UK universities.
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