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Lookup NU author(s): Roxy Walsh
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Series of watercolour paintings on linen and on gesso panel. 2 x Exhibitions with 32 page illustrated catalogue with essays on the work by Dlae McFarland (Frith Street Gallery), Adrian Rifkin (Middlesex), Sharon Kivland (Sheffield Hallam), Simon O'Sullivan (Goldsmiths).
Artist(s): Walsh R
Publication type: Exhibition
Publication status: Published
Year: 2006
Venue: DOMOBAAL Contemporary Art, London; University of Cincinnati; Bastart, Bratislava; Article Press
Location: UK/US/Slovakia
Source Publication Date: 10.06.06–15.07.06
URL: http://www.domobaal.com/exhibitions/36-06-roxy-walsh-01.html
Notes: 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 work explores and develops relationships between image and language: "Roman Jakobson defines metaphor and metonymy as the two axes of language: paradigm and syntagma, substitution and linkage. One element may take the place of another, and one element may join with another, and Sigmund Freud calls these the processes of condensation and displacement in his theory of dreams. The theory of dreams and the theory of linguistics transform through each other into a theory of the unconscious. We can read this in the work of Jacques Lacan, hearing it in his famous dictum that the unconscious is structured like a language; indeed, that to be structured and to be like a language is the same thing. In language, in structure, there is always a missing element, and meaning will always flow. There is always something that cannot be named in the system, a formulation of the impossible in the unconscious structured like a language. Meaning is suspended in the face of two heads, or two black eyes (or dots), some flower petals (or petal-like forms), a blue wash, a green stain, and a heavy black mask (‘Io Solo’)." Sharon Kivland, An Agent of the Letter, Felox Culpa 2006 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’
