Memory and time, time and colour, colour and light. Painting is a space where everything else slips away and I am free — Megan Rooney
Flyer and the Seed is London-based artist Megan Rooney’s first solo exhibition in France. Following the site-specific mural paintings realised recently to great acclaim in the Couleur en Fugue exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2022 and for CHILDHOOD at the Palais de Tokyo in 2018, the artist presents a group of new works on canvas in her signature format that corresponds to ‘the wingspan of a woman’, as well as a selection of smaller paintings. They are centred around a monumental work on canvas whose scale invokes the all-encompassing presence of her murals.
You have to know how to respond to colour, how to feel it, how to reign it in. I paint in rapid, concentrated bursts – the force it unleashes blows my hair back. There is something there that I don’t fully understand and perhaps I don’t want to — Megan Rooney
A sculptor and performance artist, as well as a painter, Rooney is known for her impassioned exploration of colour, which she uses as a vehicle for finding form. Her paintings are built through an accumulation of layers, alternating between gestural strokes of paint of varying densities, and areas where colour has been sanded down or rubbed off. The layers continue to jostle and battle just below the surface of the finished painting, giving it a sense of depth and a palpable energy.
Watch a video of the artist discussing the exhibition
At different stages of the painting, I take on different roles. For most of the painting’s life, I am tunnelling into the core of the painting, trying to get deeper. Then I become an excavator, unearthing forms which lay buried deep within the surface of the paint. Late in the painting’s life, I become bird-like. I want to fly on the surface, so I am looking for places to touch down — Megan Rooney
Rooney refers to the groups of paintings she creates together as a ‘family’. Their colours and moods correspond at times, clashing at others to immerse viewers in a changing painterly ecosystem. Although resolutely abstract, Rooney’s work always contains hints of anthropomorphic figures and references to the urban and natural worlds that surround her. Buried among gestural strokes and bursts of colour, they emerge to tell a story, drawing viewers further into the artist’s visual world.
Your Wind for my Mirror , 2022-23
Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas
199.6 x 152.3 cm (78.58 x 59.96 in)
Sunday Laundry, 2023
Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas
199.6 x 152.3 cm (78.58 x 59.96 in)
‘This is an Arcadian painting in the ancient sense of the word: not idyll, but untamed and ferocious, the territory of the noble savage. The painting has a dash of Monet’s late style, when he made his grandes decorations, Arcadian visions in full bloom and flooded light. As such, Rooney stands in a long tradition of artists, from Poussin to Turner to Twombly. The title of Poussin’s masterpiece of 1638, Et in Arcadia ego – even in Arcadia, there am I – reminds us of two things: the presence of our fickle and fallible selves in all the worlds that we have created in poetry and prose and paint; and the recognition that a world without change is not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful.’ — Matthew Holman, ‘Megan Rooney: Eyes on Arcadia’, exhibition booklet, 2023, pp. 11–12
My paintings are born out of acute observations of the world around me. The signs and references in my paintings come from the street, from the urban environment and from nature — Megan Rooney
The artist’s allusions to her predecessors are drawn out by curator Matthew Holman in the essay accompanying this new family of works. Rooney hints at their influence in the titles of her works, as well as in their formal aspect. And yet, as she explains, each painting has ‘its own desire, its own will’. They become like a cast of characters, partly shaped by the artist, and partly by the paint itself.
I think of my paintings as an informal collaboration between my body, the city and light conditions on any given day — Megan Rooney
‘In canvases like the otherworldly Stars and Numerals, fierce reverberations of viridian green, cobalt and lemon yellow are neither symphony nor discordance. The iridescence of the phthalo green emanates from a centrifugal centre, forming a smouldering electric glow like a neon sign bathed in sunlight. Rather than taking us further away from lived experience and into a reverie of paint and line alone, Rooney’s paintings make perpetual demands on us to pay attention to the material truths of the world around us.’ — Matthew Holman, ‘Megan Rooney: Eyes on Arcadia’, exhibition booklet, 2023, p. 5
Stars and Numerals, 2023
Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas
199.6 x 152.3 cm (78.58 x 59.96 in)
Something like you (me), 2022-23
Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas
199.6 x 152.3 cm (78.58 x 59.96 in)
Rooney’s prominent use of line across the paintings in the exhibition seems to point to an elemental desire to leave a trace of our existence, as well as recalling her own earliest experiments with printmaking. At the same time, the line represents a new expansion of Rooney’s visual vocabulary, providing a counterpoint to her atmospheric treatment of paint by reversing her usual process and allowing form to lead her to colour.
Wild Wind Roaming (Night), 2022-23
Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas
199.6 x 152.3 cm (78.58 x 59.96 in)
Flyer and the Seed, 2022-23
Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas
199.6 x 152.3 cm (78.58 x 59.96 in)
The lunar, vegetative, decomposing kind of state that you see in some of the paintings is contrasted with the light changing now as the sharpness of the winter light changes — Megan Rooney
