ROXY
WALSH: FELIX CULPA
JUNE 2006
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Private View: Friday 9 June 7 to 9pm
Exhibition dates: 10 June to 15 July 2006
Open: Thursday to Saturday 12 to 6pm and by appointment
Felix like the cat
Culpable like a guilty gulp
As a child I collected voices. There was nothing to show for it,
and little to hear. What I remember is the pleasure of exploring
the cavities in my head.
Odd, funny and beautiful, these new paintings by Roxy Walsh are
spooked with creatures appearing out of pale puddles of paint. There
are fingers and holes and circles, a hart with a necklace and knitted
squirrels’ ears. Sometimes the images mimic words or small
children, cropping up again and again, looking like they want to
be to be understood.
The paintings are made in watercolour on linen or on gesso panel.
They are made slowly through a process of painting and washing,
overpriming and repainting. The delicacy of the medium allows for
slowly worked paintings to retain aspects of immediacy and accident
alongside more constructed passages, to bring together different
kinds of imagery and influence in an apparently coherent visual
field. The work is highly deliberate, but the rules of deliberation
are opaque.
The paintings play with visual expectations as poetry plays with
our expectations of words, shifting direction just when you think
that you know what you are looking at. A single element may be picture-book
simple, but read once as a planet, again as the pupil of an eye,
again as a disc, dragged and slipped through paint. This work is
concerned with the underworld of words and co-joined images: grounded
in abstraction, but inflected with figurative speech.
Jonathan Goodman wrote of Walsh’s
paintings: ‘beyond
their erotic ironies’ (they are) ‘primarily about the
pleasures of language and painting’: ‘In their diminutive
size and lyricism, these works feel like short poems.’ ‘...she
seems filled with a musical regret. Her stylized provocations are
a way of keeping the poetic alive’ .
Felix
Culpa is Roxy Walsh’s first show at DOMOBAAL. She has had
previous solo shows at Mobile Home Gallery, London, and Annika Sundvik,
New York. In 2000 she was an Abbey Awardee in Painting at the British
School at Rome. She is curator and editor of Infallible, In Search
of the Real George Eliot, a touring exhibition and book exploring
and developing relationships between fiction and contemporary Art.
Roxy will be participating in the 2006 Braziers International Artists’
Workshop. Forthcoming group shows include Dr Dee’s Library
at the British Museum and The Ost Archives at Danielle Arnaud.’Felix
Culpa’ will also be shown at Bastart, Bratislava, Slovakia,
this October, and The Reed Gallery, University of Cincinnati, USA
in January and February 2007.
A
catalogue of this exhibition will be published in July by Article
Press with essays by Sharon Kivland, Dale McFarland, Simon O'Sullivan
& Adrian Rifkin, designed by o-sb.
1 Art in America, 7/98
next:
Ansel Krut: 15.09 - 21.10.06
Jeffrey T Y Lee: November/December
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download essay by Sharon Kivland as pdf
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download essay by Simon O'Sullivan as pdf
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download essay by Adrian Rifkin as pdf
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