Get lost in Megan Rooney’s abstract, emotional paintings The artist finds worlds in yellow and blue at Thaddaeus Ropac London
By Hannah Silver
The experience of looking at Megan Rooney’s work is full of surprises. Immediately striking is the size – Rooney paints freely in the ‘wingspan’ format, where she paints as far as her arm can reach – and in the glorious gradients of colours. Look closer, and stories begin to reveal themselves in the fluidity of the works, rich in references and physical touchpoints.
Rooney, who refers to each group of work as a ‘family’, has explored the territory between yellow and blue, stepping into the rich prism of green, for her new body of work at Thaddaeus Ropac London. Marking a moment of transition from one season to the next, each painting tells its own story yet is linked to the other works in an embodiment of a clear narrative.
‘Each painting has its own personality, and the lifespan in each painting is really different from its neighbour,’ says Rooney, speaking from her studio in south-west London the week before her exhibition opening. ‘It’s a slow, protracted process over many months, where I go back and forth in and out of the painting while it accumulates information – different tensions, different emotions, different colour responses. It's actually really slow, even though the paintings have a feeling of movement. But that is a bit misleading, because the movement, for me, comes towards the end of the painting’s life.’
Through a process of layering, undoing, scrubbing, sanding, waiting and repainting, Rooney creates a rich relationship with the work that goes deeper than the surface of a first impression. ‘At the beginning, I am stuck with something blank and empty, and I don't know it. So I like to accelerate quickly through the beginning part, because I don't like new friends. It’s a medium that is very elusive: you're dealing with paint, and it has to dry and set, and has its own agenda, and unless you're willing to be very patient with it, you end up just moving things around that haven't really percolated on the surface.
