Review: DANNY ROLPH - Automatic Shoes

The main body of this lively exhibition consists of four large abstract paintings. At first glance there is something transitory happening here. There’s a lightness of touch, a physical speed of execution, the use of smart but ultimately cheap materials: collage, daubs of bright acrylic paint, and - here is the surprise - Triplewall. This is 3-layered cellular polycarbonate sheeting, more commonly seen in greenhouses or shopping centre canopies of the kind you see in industrial parks.

These are complex objects. The apparent randomness of composition is held together by what appears to be a rather precise set of rules.  Each work is constructed from two sandwiched layers of Triplewall up to 2 metres wide. The bottom layer can be in a transparent blue, the top layer is left uncoloured. Pictorial collage and patterned paper can be placed mainly in the interlayer, as can more loosely applied paint, such as spatters. A more formal system of mark making in bright or pearlescent acrylic is employed on the surface – angled lines, dynamic, sharply pointed shapes, created with masking tape and parallel strokes of paint. These are painted transluscently, in one go; one senses that there is only one chance to get it right. Attempts at neatness are matched by a swift rigour that does not allow for the removal of smudges or, with a few clumsy exceptions, overpainting.  Such quality of work is evidence of both delicacy and a deft, practised hand.

Then there are the titles – all the names of deceased Prime Ministers. Odd. Since the titles are provided on A4 sheets and are not on the wall, here the fun starts – is this one more like Lloyd George or Ramsey MacDonald, and having established that that one is Neville Chamberlain – well it’s hard to resist peering through the top layers of paint for Hitler amongst all the collage material. But to no avail: the choice of imagery – mainly cut outs from old museum, fashion and auction magazines or postcards, seems more like a passing personal association taken from an enthusiastic collection of cuttings rather than anything more incisively illuminating. Bits of old furniture. The odd family photo.  Perhaps the undirectness is deliberate. You instead look for, invent, connections.

And perhaps looking for the connections is the point of these works. One peers through the top layers trying to make sense of the relationships between the materials, the shapes, the colours. In the gallery basement, a more traditional series of paintings on canvas explore just these two aspects of colour and form – elegant dialogues between hard lines and curvilinear flourishes. On the opposite wall the dialogue is further reduced to an exploratory series of drawings in coloured pencil that reveals an obvious dialogue with Kandinsky in the 1910s & 20s.

Which brings me back to trying to understand what is happening graphically in the large paintings. Kandinsky is there, so too is a heady whiff of Pop Art, and there’s more than mere flirtation with Cubism in the technical experimentation, paint and collage, and the urge to look behind the painted objects to see what is going on. 

Is the “Automatic” in the title a reference to a series of practical Fluxus-like instructions applied to Danny Rolph’s language, itself in dialogue with 20^th century artists -  in the “Shoes” of, so to speak? Too glib an explanation, surely… But wherever we are, one senses that the artist will not remain here for long. It’s a pleasant enough playground to pause in though.