ART CITIES: Paris-Megan Rooney
An enigmatic storyteller, Megan Rooney works across a variety of media – including painting, sculpture, installation, performance and language – to develop interwoven narratives. The body has a sustained presence in her work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her practice. The subjects of her works are drawn directly from her own life and surroundings, while her references are deeply invested in the present moment.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Thaddaeus Roppac Gallery Archive
“Flyer and the Seed” 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’. These paintings are centred around a monumental work on canvas whose scale invokes the all-encompassing presence of her murals. Painting on uniform canvases measuring 200 x 150 cm – the wingspan of the average woman – Rooney presents layers of ethereal forms, often sanded back and painted over multiple times to create abstracted narratives without a discernible beginning or end. Rooney refers to the groups of paintings she creates together as a “family”. Their colors and moods correspond at times, clashing at others to immerse viewers in a changing painterly ecosystem. The artist’s allusions to her predecessors, including Poussin, Turner and Monet, 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. ‘My paintings are born out of acute observations of the world around me,’ states Rooney. “I think of them as an informal collaboration between my body, the city and light conditions on any given day”. Each of the works created for the exhibition has its own ‘internal weather system’, as Matthew Holman describes it, which reflects the rapidly changing light of the winter months during which the artist was painting. Rooney’s studio is perched on the third floor of an old hospital building in the heart of London, giving her a bird’s eye view of the streets below, as well as a rare unimpeded sightline to the sky. The artist captures this sense of suspension in her new paintings, which combine traces of what she describes as a ‘lunar, vegetative, decomposing kind of state’ and luminous expanses of color. 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 color, they emerge to tell a story, drawing viewers further into the artist’s visual world. For Rooney, “all painting is about storytelling”. As a form of mark-making, her practice allows her to connect, as she describes it, ‘to the oldest parts of humanity’. ‘Telling stories is a central part of the human condition’, she states. ‘This impulse to leave a trace, to make a mark, to say I was here.’ Her prominent use of line across the paintings in the exhibition seems to point to this elemental desire, 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 color. “You spend your life as a painter developing a relationship to colour and then testing the limits of that relationship”, Rooney reflects. “It’s radical, it’s ever-changing – it can submit to you and it can betray you. It always seduces, always excites”.
Photo: Megan Rooney, Stand Up Sky, 2021, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 273.5 x 700 (107.7 x 275.6 in), © Megan Rooney, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Roppac Gallery
Info: Thaddaeus Roppac Gallery, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, France, Duration: 11/3-22/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net
