Yellow Yellow Blue: Notes on an Exhibition by Megan Rooney

Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue (2025)

Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas

(200 x 152 cm / 78.5 x 60 in) 

Photo by Maria Thanassa

 

'You spend your life as a painter developing a relationship to colour and then 

testing the limits of that relationship. It’s radical, it’s ever-changing - 

it can submit to you and it can betray you. It always seduces, always excites.'  

                                                                                               - Megan Rooney

 

 

I. 

 

Sometimes you visit an exhibition because you know and admire the work of the artist and wish to be reassured of their genius and reconfirmed in the soundness of your past judgement and the continuity of one's aesthetic tastes.   

 

Sometimes, however, you visit an exhibition without any prior knowledge or formed opinion and in the hope that perhaps you'll discover something new not only about art, but about one's self ... 

 

And so to Thaddaeus Ropac, to see an exhibition of new paintings by the London-based artist Megan Rooney entitled Yellow Yellow Blue ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Probably it was the title of the show that first caught my interest: I like yellow and I like blue and in this body of work Rooney explores the chromatic territory that lies between yellow and blue (as well as the spectrum of green that emerges from mixing these two primary colours).   

 

Yellow I love for its emotional intensity (its joy, its vibrancy, its madness) [2]; blue for its profundity - for blue is the colour of the Greater Day and of the Void much loved by painters, poets, and philosophers; a colour which Christian Dior once described as the only one that can possibly compete with black, which remains the ne plus ultra of all colours [3]. 

 

But, having read the press release for the show, I was intrigued also to see how Rooney - said to be an enigmatic storyteller - manages to construct a dreamlike narrative indirectly referencing "some of the most urgent issues of our time" whilst also addressing "the myriad effects of politics and society that manifest in the home and on the female body" [4], simply by using colours, lines, shapes, and gestural marks on canvas in an almost entirely abstract manner.

 

For whilst I'm happy to accept that you can use purely visual elements to convey emotion or explore the formal qualities of painting as an art, I'm not entirely convinced (as a writer and philosopher) that you can adequately convey the kind of ideas mentioned above simply with such elements; ultimately, words - not colours - remain the primary tool for this. 

 

 

III. 

 

Located on the gallery's two floors, Yellow Yellow Blue presents pieces ranging from a dozen or so small works on paper (pretty enough, but not massively exciting) to large-scale (slightly overwhelming) canvases alongside a family of works in Rooney's signature wingspan format (i.e., equivalent to the full-reach of her outstretched arms). 

 

A bit like Goldilocks, I preferred these works; not too big, not too small, just right in size; for like D. H. Lawrence, I think it important that an artist acknowedge their limitations and the fact that they end at their finger-tips [5].

 

I liked the fact that Rooney clearly puts a LOT of work into what she does; constantly layering on paint, then sanding the works down and attempting to discover forms which might lie buried deep within the surface, before then slapping on more and more paint. 

 

By her own confession, Rooney often continues working on canvases right up until the opening; some seemed to be still wet in places and one could smell the canvases before even entering the room to view them - this was something else I also liked very much.   

 

Some works made one think of Monet and his water lilies and as I believe abstract impressionism is a thing, I don't think that's too crass or naive an observation [6]. Other works, because of their yellowness as an essential common feature, invariably made one think of Van Gogh. 

 

Still, as Rooney likes to talk of her paintings as having family connections - i.e., of being intimately connected to one another "as well as the lineage of paintings that precedes them" [7], I don't suppose she'll object to my seeing of similarities between her works and those of le dandy of impressionism and het gekke menneke of post-impressionism.  

 

 

IV. 

 

"Does anyone know, really, what a life is?" asks Emily LaBarge [8].    

 

As a reader of Deleuze, I suppose I could put my hand up and answer: Yes: a life is something inseparable from philosophy conceived in terms of pure immanence; something that has to be invented [9].   

But nobody likes a smart arse and I suppose it's essentially a rhetorical question - albeit one the answer to which just might lie in painting, according to LaBarge; an art form that captures something of temporal and spatial reality, even whilst painting does not quite belong to the same temporal and spatial reality of this world.  

Thus it is that: "As soon as we think we have identified something recognisable in [Rooney's paintings] - a copse of trees? a flurry of lilacs? a sunrise? a chimney? a rain-soaked evening? - it disappears ..."  

That's true - or at least, I think I know what Ms LaBarge means by this: All that is solid melts into light and colour, as Marx might have put it. 

 

The moment you grasp something concrete in Rooney's work, "it departs, skitters away, taking your heart with it, if only to throw it back to you [...] with the reminder that this image is also, first and formost, a painting: a made thing, worked and burnished [...] where luminous forms merge and fly like ghosts". 

 

And that's the beauty of abstract art; it doesn't just present on a plate like representational art - it gives, takes back, and gives once more - or, more precisely perhaps, it shows and hides and then shows some more in a provocative game of tease: It always seduces, always excites!

 

And if it fails to satisfy, that's arguably the point and it tells us something crucial not only about pleasure, but about the allure and withdrawal of objects in a way that a still life cannot.  

 

     

Megan Rooney photographed in her studio 

by Eva Herzog (2023)

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) 12 June - 2 August 2025: click here for details. 

      See also Megan Rooney's page on ropac.net: click here, or visit her own website: megan-rooney.com   

 

[2] See the post 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here. 

 

[3] I have written several posts on the colour blue in art and literature; click here, for example, for a post dated 1 April 2017 on Rilke's blue delirium; or click here, for a post dated 2 April 2017 on the work of Yves Klein.  

 

[4] From the exhibition press release written by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press, Thaddaeus Ropac London): click here. 

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985). pp.191-198. 

      Lawrence argues that every man or woman - artist, philosopher, poet, or scientist included - ends at their own finger-tips and that this is a simple, but profoundly vital, truth. We may draw sustenance and stimulation from outside ourselves - from sights and sounds and smells and ideas, etc. - and these may allow us to change, but it's the living body upon which these things act that remains the most important. 

      Rooney appears to share this view, which is why she (mostly) likes to keep her canvases roughly 200 x 152 cm in size; i.e., in relation to her own reach, her own body. Thus, as it says in the gallery's press release: "The body has a sustained presence in Rooney’s work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her [...] practice."   

 

[6] Abstract impressionism is an art movement that originated in New York City, in the 1940s, the term apparently being coined by the painter and critic Elaine de Kooning and then popularised by Louis Finkestein (initially to describe the works of Philip Guston). 

      I'm not sure Rooney would wish to be associated with the term, but there is something lyrical in her canvases and although resolutely abstract, her works "contain fleeting suggestions of recognisable forms [...] ladders, beehives, clouds, trees, skies and tombs weave through the exhibition, like fugitive glimpses of a half-dreamed world". Again, see the gallery press release by Nina Sandhaus available to download from the Thaddaeus Ropac website.

 

[7] Nina Sandhaus, press release for Yellow Yellow Blue.  

 

[8] Emily LaBarge, 'Like the Flap of a Wave', written for the catalogue to Megan Rooney's exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue (Thaddaeus Ropac London, 2025). All lines quoted in this section of the post are from this text unless stated otherwise. 

      The title of the piece refers us to the possibility that if you squint hard enough and long enough at Rooney's large canvases you might just imagine, as LeBarge did, "Virginia Woolf's London as described by her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, on a fresh morning in spring [...] when everything seems [...] to be happening all at once, the past and present kaleidoscoping in a work of art".      

[9] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Pure Immanence: A Life', in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, Intro. by John Rajchman, trans. Anne Boyman (Zone Books, 2005).  

 

 

In Praise of the Chance Encounter of Objects and Bodies: Reflections on David Salle's Postmodern Pastoral

David Salle: Suspenders (2025) 

Oil, acrylic, Flashe and charcoal on archival UV print on linen 

(72 x 108 in)

 ropac.net

 

'I've always had a desire to scramble the visual world into a vortex, 

to kind of desolidify painted reality into something that has

 the fluidity and velocity of a great abstract painting.' - DS

 

 

I. 

 

The 1980s was a great time to be a young painter (or a yuppie of any variety). 

 

And whilst some of those who rose to fame in this decade didn't make it out alive - one thinks of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, for example - others are still going strong and producing interesting work 40 years on, even whilst they are no longer quite so young as they once were (who is?).  

 

Jeff Koons, born in 1955, would be one obvious example of an enfant terrible now turned silver fox; and David Salle, born three years earlier in 1952, is another. And it's Salle and his new solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) - Some Versions of Pastoral (10 April - 10 June 2025) - that I wish to speak of here ...    

 

 

II.

 

The exhibition borrows its title from a 1935 book by the English critic and poet William Empson;  one that is widely recognised as an extraordinary work of literary criticism and written in his charismatically informal style. 

 

Traditionally, the pastoral refers to works that depict an idealised version of rural life featuring shepherds, livestock, and idyllic landscapes. Artists didn't aim for a faithful representation, so much as the construction of an artificial reality designed to appeal to an urban audience rather than those who actually live in the countryside and work the land. 

 

The intent was to trigger a longing for a more tranquil existence rooted in nature and for simpler times, free from the complexities and stresses of modern life. 

 

But Salle is having none of that: his postmodern pastoral is less about bucolic myth and more about combining (what might appear to be random) images - some original and some appropriated from a wide range of sources including magazines, billboards, cartoons, and art history - in what he describes as a circuitous freefall that has neither beginning nor end, although these images of objects and bodies do dramatically converge on a plane of consisency [1].

 

The gallery's press release describes things perfectly:

 

"In these new paintings, the artist uses his own oeuvre - specifically, a group of paintings titled the Pastorals, executed in 1999 and 2000 - as raw material. Fed into a custom-made AI programme, the works are deliberately distorted to produce a variation on the pastoral scene. These freewheeling, sometimes bewildering images are then printed onto canvas to form the backdrops on which Salle paints. The result is a lyrical body of work that teems with new plasticity, and seems to respond to our viral visual world." [2]

 

Salle, I know, has his critics; some, for example, feel he leaves just a little too much unfinished in his work and that it's so fragmented that it lacks any coherent narrative or meaningful story (and thus, for these critics, any human import or purpose). One such critic (amusingly) wrote that Salle's indifference to such criticism "is the main if not the only critically interesting thing about his work" [3]. 

 

Others object to his use of AI to conceptualise and generate images reflective of his style and although Salle affirms his right as an artist to exploit any available technology, he acknowledges the concern that superintelligent machines may one day supersede human image-makers (and do so without a pang of conscience).   

 

Ultimately, for Salle, "'machine learning affords artists the means to reconfigure pictorial space with the malleability and plasticity of pure imagination'" [4]. 

 

In other words, AI is a tool with which he can "steer through sequences of objects, forms, styles and genres without self-identification or overattachment to meaning", in a carefree manner that "finds its precedent in the 20th century's avant-garde [...] whose automatic strategies [...] were attempts to liberate creativity from conscious thought as well as prescribed aesthetic, moral and political hierarchies" [5]. 

 

Beauty, for Salle - as for Comte de Lautréamont and, indeed, Man Ray and many of the Surrrealists - is born today from the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella [6]:

 

  

Man Ray: Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection 

d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie (1933)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In art, a plane of composition refers to the arrangement and organisation of various elements within a work to create a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing whole. But by a plane of consistency, Deleuze and Guattari refer to something that opposes this and which consists only in the "relations of speed and slowness between unformed elements"; there is no finality or unification. 

      A plane of consistency, therefore, doesn't aim to produce aesthetic pleasure, so much as open up a zone of indeterminacy and a continuum of intensity upon which new thoughts and feelings can unfold and interact without being constrained by pre-existing ideas and emotions. In sum: it's a kind of virtual realm of infinite possibilities. 

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 507. 

 

[2] Press release for David Salle Some Versions of Pastoral (10 April - 8 June 2025), Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37, Dover Street, London, W1. I presume the well-written text was by the Head of Press, Nini Sandhaus. 

 

[3] Arthur Danto, quoted in Bad Reviews, ed. Aleksandra Mir and Tim Griffin (Retrospective Press, 2022). 

      Readers might like to note that Salle is himself a highly respected writer and critic; see his collection of essays entitled How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art (W. W. Norton, 2016).

[4] David Salle quoted in the press release for Some Versions of Pastoral ...

 

[5] Press release for David Salle Some Versions of Pastoral ...

 

[6] This is a famous line from the poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror (1868-69) by Comte de Lautréamont; see Canto VI, Verse 3.

Lachrymae rerum: Refections on a Painting by Joan Snyder (and in Memory of Marianne Faithfull)

 

Joan Snyder: Apple Tree Mass (1983) 

Oil, acrylic, paper mache, wood, paper, cloth, 

pencil and ink on linen (24 x 72 in) 

 

 

Yesterday, I went to see the Joan Snyder exhibition - Body & Soul - at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery (Ely House, London) [1].

 

To be honest, I can't say I'm a fan of her canvases: they're a bit much for me; too much feeling; too much introspection; too much paint; too much of everything really. 

 

However, I do admire Snyder for finding her own distinct style of painting. Via a unique use of brush strokes, for example, she exploits the narrative potential of abstraction, developing a new form of artistic expression during a career that spans more than 60 years. 

 

And I do like the fact that, when she really feels the need to do so, she's prepared to incorporate lines of text into her work. For there are times when things simply can't be said with paint; just as one discovers, as a writer, that there are limits to language, obliging one to scream or punch the wall. 

Thus, the picture that most interested was one entitled Apple Tree Mass (1983), which made use of the beautiful Latin phrase Lachrymae rerum - translated by the artist as the 'tearfulness of things' [2]. 

 

I was still thinking about this phrase and what it might mean, when, just as the day turned to evening, I heard the sad news of Marianne Faithfull's death and immediately her sixties hit came to mind, further encouraging thoughts of tears [3] ... and a longing for a Mars bar [4].  

 

 

Ad in Cash Box (19 Sept 1964)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The exhibition is on at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, Mayfair, London W1, until 5 Feb 2025 (having opened on 28 Nov 2024). Full details of the exhibition and a short filmed interview with Snyder can be found on the gallery website: click here.   

[2] This phrase - open to interpretation - derives from Book I, line 462 of Virgil's Aeneid (c. 29-19 BC), where it is written as Lacrimae rerum. I'm guessing Snyder may have spelt the first word as she did thinking of Frederic Leighton's painting Lachrymae (1894-95). 

 

[3] 'As Tears Go By' was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, at the instigation of their manager at the time Andrew Loog Oldham. It is unclear whether it was composed especially for 17-year-old Marianne Faithfull or not and over the years she both confirmed and denied this story, whilst acknowledging that the song suited her so perfectly that it may as well have been. 

      It was released as a single in the UK, sung by Faithfull, in 1964, and became a top ten hit, launching her singing career: click here to play.  

[4] See Jack Whatley's article in Far Out Magazine (27 July 2021) which attempts to provide the truth behind the story involving Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger, and a Mars bar: click here.