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).  

 

[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). 

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - 'More Yellow, More Blue!' (29 June 2025), please click here.    

 

 

Simian Aesthetics 2: The Case of Pierre Brassau

Pierre Brassau (aka Peter the Chimp) 
seen here in his studio

Having discussed the case of Congo in the first post in this two-part series on simian aesthetics, I'd like here to say something on the amusing tale of Pierre Brassau - aka Peter the Chimp - and his fraudulent foray into the art world ...  

Peter, a four-year-old West African chimpanzee who resided at a zoo in Sweden, was at the centre of a 1964 hoax perpetrated on the art world by the tabloid journalist Åke Axelsson, who came up with the idea of exhibiting a series of paintings made by a monkey under the pretence that they were by a previously undiscovered (human) artist called Pierre Brassau.

Axelsson sought to demonstrate that contemporary art critics were full of shit and wouldn't be able to tell the difference between canvases daubed with paint by a great ape and those produced by leading members of the avant-garde.

(Axelsson, of course, thereby betrays his own prejudices: he's a sneering reactionary who dislikes (because he doesn't understand) modern art and he's full of anthropocentric conceit in that he doesn't for one moment consider the possibility that a chimp might be able to produce art that is of genuine interest and value.)

Having enlisted the help of his keeper, Axelsson gave Peter painting materials and encouraged him to express himself. Unfortunately, at first Peter seemed to prefer eating the oil paints - particularly the cobalt blue - rather than using them to decorate a canvas. However, he eventually got the hang of it and produced a number of abstract works. 

Axelsson then selected what he believed to be the four best and arranged for their exhibition at a gallery in Gothenburg, alongside works by an international array of artists.

Praise for Brassau's work was almost unanimous, with one critic, Rolf Anderberg, writing that whilst most of the canvases on display were ponderous, those of Brassau were painted with powerful strokes that twisted with furious fastidiousness and determination. Brassau, concluded Anderberg, "is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer".

After the hoax was revealed, Anderberg - to his credit - refused to change his opinion and insisted that, ape or not, Peter's work was still by far the best at the exhibition. A private collector, Bertil Eklöt, seemed to agree and purchased one of the works (albeit at the bargain price of just $90).

As for what happened to Peter once his brief career as an artist came to an end, I don't know. He was transferred to Chester Zoo, in 1969, and, presumably, he lived out the rest of his life happily eating bananas in anonymity.


For more detail and images, visit the Museum of Hoaxes website: click here.

For the first post in this two-part series on simian aesthetics, click here.

A Pierre Brassau original 

(untitled, 1964, oil on canvas)

Simian Aesthetics 1: The Case of Congo the Chimp

Congo and one of his more mature works

Everyone knows that monkeys make great copyists. We even have a verb in English, to ape, meaning to mimic someone or something closely (albeit in a rather clumsy, sometimes mocking manner). But what isn't so widely known is that they can also be original artists, producing works that have real aesthetic value and interest in and of themselves and not merely because they are produced by the hairy hand of a non-human primate.  

Take the case of Congo, for example, who, with the help of the zoologist and surrealist Desmond Morris, developed a lyrical style of painting that has much in common with abstract impressionism.

Congo first came to Morris's attention in 1956 when, aged two, he was given a pencil and paper. It was obvious the young chimp had innate drawing ability and a basic sense of composition. In addition, Congo had a very clear idea of whether a picture had or had not been completed: if a work was taken away that he didn't consider finished, he would scream and work himself up into a tantrum; but once he considered a work to be done, then he would refuse to work on it further, no matter what inducements were made.

Within a couple of years Congo had made several hundred sketches and paintings and during the late 1950s he made frequent TV appearances, showcasing his talents live from London Zoo alongside Morris. Congo became even more of a simian cause célèbre when the Institute of Contemporary Arts mounted a large exhibition of his work (along with that by other talented apes) in the autumn of 1957.

Discussing this event in a recent interview,* Morris explained that the importance of the show lay in the fact that it was the first time that zoology and fine art had come together in order to examine the evolutionary roots of man's aesthetic delight in images. Morris also recalls how originally nervous the ICA were about the exhibition, worrying, for example, that other all too human artists might find the idea absurd and insulting. Thankfully, it was decided by ICA founders Roland Penrose and Herbert Read that the show had to go on. 

And, as it turned out, critical reaction to the exhibition within the art world and wider media was mixed, but mostly on the positive side. Indeed, when Picasso heard about Congo, he immediately showed interest and hung one of the chimp's paintings on his studio wall. Later, when asked by a journalist why he had done so, Picasso went over and bit him.

Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí were also impressed by Congo's work. The former delighted in the intelligence of composition and the latter compared Congo's attempt to control his brushstrokes favourably to the random splashing of Jackson Pollock, saying that whilst Pollock painted with the hand of an animal, Congo painted with a hand that was quasi-human.**

Sadly, Congo's brief but glittering career as an artist ended with his death from tuberculosis in 1964, when he was aged just ten years old. His legacy, however, lives on, and in 2005 Bonham's auctioned a number of his paintings alongside those by Renoir and Warhol. Amusingly, whilst the works of these illustrious human painters didn't sell on the day, Congo's sold for far more than expected, with an American collector snapping up three works for over $25,000. 

We arrive, finally, at the obvious question: Is a picture painted by a chimpanzee really a work of art?

For me, the answer has to be yes and to argue otherwise does seem suspiciously like speciesism. Of course, as Desmond Morris acknowledges, this is not to say Congo was a great artist or that his work deserves the same critical attention as that given to work of the human artists named above. But neither does it deserve to be dismissed as rubbish. Ultimately, Congo's fascinating canvases are, as Morris says, "extraordinary records of an experiment which proves beyond doubt that we aren't the only species that can control visual patterns".    

Notes

*A transcript of this interview in which Morris discusses the controversial exhibition Paintings by Chimpanzees (1957) can be found on the archive page of the ICA website: click here. The transcript is the third of a three part series based on an interview by Melanie Coles with Desmond Morris at his studio in Oxford, 2016 (ed. Melanie Coles and Maya Caspari).

See also Desmond Morris's study of the picture-making behaviour of the great apes in relation to the art produced by humans; The Biology of Art, (Methuen, 1962). 

**Heidegger, of course, wouldn't allow this statement to pass unchallenged, believing as he did that the human hand is what distinguishes man from all other beasts, including the ape. Thus, according to Heidegger, whilst chimps possess prehensile organs capable of holding and manipulating objects, they do not have hands in the unique manner that humans being do. Indeed, for Heidegger, there is an ontological abyss between Pollock's hand and Congo's. I shall discuss this at greater length in a forthcoming post.

Readers interested in part two of this post on simian aesthetics - the case of Pierre Brassau - should click here.