More Yellow, More Blue: Further Thoughts on an Exhibition by Megan Rooney

Emily LaBarge and Megan Rooney

against Rooney's Yellow Yellow Blue (2025)

Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas 

(200 x 152 cm / 78.5 x 60 in)   

 

 

I. 

 

Having visited an exhibition by an artist I was shamefully unaware of until very recently [1] - and having come away greatly impressed by the paintings and a little in love with the painter - I simply had to attend an event hosted by the gallery in which said artist, Megan Rooney, was to be joined in conversation by her friend and interlocutor, the Canadian writer Emily LaBarge [2]. 

 

And so, on a sunny Saturday morning, it's back into Town and back to the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (located in one of Mayfair's finest eighteenth-century mansion houses: Ely House) ... 

 

 

II.        

 

As I said in the original post written on Rooney's exhibition, it was the title of the show - Yellow Yellow Blue - that first caught my interest: I like yellow and I like blue, although maybe not with the same obsessive intensity as Megan; she really loves these colours and the chromatic territory that lies between them. 

 

But whilst yellow makes her want to tap her foot and dance and be swallowed by the sun, and blue makes her want to contemplate the secret of a colour that comes in many different shades and varies dramatically in intensity and brightness, I'm still not sure she offers us a new concept of these colours. 

 

But then, to be fair - even if abstract art is an attempt at some level to dissolve the distinction between art and philosophy - Rooney is an image-maker first and foremost and doesn't claim to be a philosopher. For whilst the latter are concerned with metaphysical constructions that define and enable a style of thinking, artists, as a rule, are more interested in novel combinations of sensation and feeling. 

 

In other words, art is a game of percepts and affects, not concepts: just as important and as vital as philosophy, but a very different way of confronting chaos [3]. For whereas philosophy wishes to give to chaos a certain consistency (and moves from chaos to concept), art wants to create forms invested with a little wild and windy chaos, whilst steadily moving from chaos to composition [4]. 

 

In sum: what Deleuze and Guattari say of artists in general, I would say of Rooney in particular; she struggles with chaos "in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant" [5]. 

 

In fact, it would be more accurate to say that she's struggling less against chaos and more against the thing that all artists dread: cliché. And the reason she inflicts such violence on her canvases is in order that she might erase any trace of the latter and not simply scrub away the colour. 

 

But that's not an easy task; for the cliché is pre-existent and even after one primes or treats a blank canvas, it's still there, hiding, and threatening to ensure artistic failure (even if one produces a conventionally successful picture that is praised by critics and public alike).      

 

 

III. 

 

Interestingly, Rooney talks about her works as excavations; as if she's searching for something. But what is she searching for ...?

 

We know that beneath the paving stones lies the beach, but what lies beneath the multiple layers of paint she adds, removes, and reapplies to a canvas? Towards the end of their conversation, LaBarge suggested that it might possibly be love, but Rooney (to her credit) seemed resistant to that suggestion. 

 

So let's propose rather that she's looking for something that we might call truth ... Only it's a truth born of chaos and isn't tied to goodness or even beauty (although there is certainly beauty in Rooney's work and perhaps even an ethic to do with innocence and becoming rather than moral conformity).     

Perhaps we might better name this truth with the Ancient Greek term ἀλήθεια (aletheia) ... An unorthodox concept of truth first given us by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides and famously developed by Heidegger, who translated aletheia into German as Unverborgenheit (disclosure or, more literally, unconcealment).

 

Like Heidegger, Rooney seems to be enchanted by the manner in which objects reveal their presence before then withdrawing back into the darkness, never quite allowing us to grasp their truth in full. LaBarge was spot on to write that as soon as we think we have identified something recognisable in Rooney's works - a flower, a sunrise, a chimney pot - it melts once more back into light and colour, or retreats into shadow and silence [5].   

 

And it's the concept of aletheia that explains this phenomenon ... 

 

For aletheia is a radically different notion of truth and a radically different ontological model of the world to the one in which things are fixed and can be made fully present to mind. If one subscribes to the concept of aletheia then you can forget about ever being able to accurately describe a state of affairs or have full knowledge of anything. All of a sudden, absence matters at least as much as presence and being rests upon non-being as a distinct aspect of reality. 

 

In his essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art', Heidegger says the true value of a work of art is that it opens a clearing for the appearance of things in the world; and this glimpse affords human beings the opportunity to formulate not only a degree of knowledge, but meaning [6].

  

Amusingly, as LaBarge also notes, when those things momentarily glimpsed in one of Rooney's abstract (but not resolutely abstract) canvases withdraws it takes your heart with it. And that's not only a rather lovely thought, but an accurate one hinting as it does at the seductive beauty of Rooney's work. 

 

Ultimately, her canvases are like an erotic game of hide and seek; they tease and excite, without ever quite satisfying and this tells us something crucial not only about pleasure and the magical allure of objects, but about the nature of existence.         

 

 

IV. 

   

When leaving the gallery, I overheard a woman say that Rooney's canvases are so completely full of colour that they leave the viewer unable to move or breathe. But, actually, that's profoundly false and if she genuinely feels stifled, then, well, maybe she should loosen her girdle. 

 

For Rooney always leaves (or creates) just enough space to allow us to both move and breathe by making a slit in the Great Umbrella: "And lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision" [7]; a window to the yellow of the sun and the brilliant blue of the Greater Day. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The artist in question is Megan Rooney and the exhibition is titled Yellow Yellow Blue, at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) 12 June - 2 August 2025: click here for details and/or here for my original post on the exhibition (26 June 2025). 

 

[2] Emily LaBarge wrote the introductory text - 'Like the Flap of a Wave' - for the catalogue to accompany Megan Rooney's exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue (Thaddaeus Ropac London, 2025). Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including the London Review of Books, and she is a regular contributor to The New York Times. For more information and to read her work, visit her website: click here. 

 

[3] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994). 

      And see also D. H. Lawrence's essay 'Chaos in Poetry', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116; an essay that Deleuze and Guattari freely borrow from in their work.     

 

[4] This move from chaos to composition is crucial: for art is not chaos, "but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes [...] a composed chaos - neither foreseen nor preconceived". See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 204.   

 

[5] Emily LaBarge, 'Like the Flap of a Wave', introductory essay for the catalogue to accompany Megan Rooney's exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue (Thaddaeus Ropac London, 2025). 

 

[6] See Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Rouledge, 1993), pp. 139-212. This essay as it appears here was first presented as a tripartite lecture entitled Der Urspung des Kunstwerkes, presented in Frankfurt in 1936.     

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Chaos in Poetry' ... op. cit., p. 109. 

 

 

This post is for Hemma Matuschka (née Khevenhüller-Metsch) Head of Events and Client Development at Thaddaeus Ropac London, in gratitude for all her hard work and attention to detail.   

  

 

On Lightness of Being (In Memory of Milan Kundera)

 

'Life which disappears once and for all, which does not return is without weight 

and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime means nothing at all.'

 

I. 

 

Milan Kundera, the Czech-French novelist who died earlier this month, aged 94, was one of those writers whom I tried (but failed) to read and to love - Umberto Eco would be another such author. 

 

And so it is that the only work of his to which I ever returned was the philosophical novel for which he is best remembered, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) [1]. And it's this work about which I'd like to make some brief remarks ...

 

 

II.   

 

Set in the late 1960s and early '70s - i.e., during and just after the so-called Prague Spring period - it is the tale of a sex-obsessed surgeon, Tomáš, who eventually learns how to love and remain faithful to his wife, Tereza, an animal-loving photographer with hang-ups about her body. 

 

It is the story also of Tomáš's mistress and confidante, Sabina, an artist who has declared war on kitsch and puritanism and wishes to lead a life of extreme lightness [2].

 

Essentially, the novel challenges Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence; an idea which, were it true - or were we to take it seriously and act as if it were true - would lie upon our actions as the greatest weight. 

 

Kundera obliges his characters (and readers) to ask themselves how they would live were they to know for sure that they only have one life to live and that which occurs in life does so once and once only - would this lightness of being bring freedom and happiness, or become unbearable: for without weight (i.e. existential meaning), do not all our actions become trivial and worthless? [3]

 

 

III.

 

Einmal ist keinmal, as our German friends like to say - i.e., once is never enough; indeed, once is as good as never having happened at all. If a human life, for example, fails to forever return, then once it is over it is truly over and the universe can simply carry on in utter indifference.

 

Obviously, as a floraphile - that is to say, as one who loves flowers and locates their beauty precisely in the fact that they bloom and then fade with no sense of shame, or responsibility, or significance - I am not particularly troubled by such a thought, nor do I accept the logic. 

 

And whilst I don't think we can ever become soulless like the flowers - or that this would be desirable - that doesn't mean that men and women should forever live as beasts of burden, weighed down by moral seriousness.      

 

Similarly, as a lover of birds, I approve of young women like Sabina learning how to fly in defiance of the spirit of gravity - even if that means they must first hollow out their bones; it is better to live in freedom with nothing to eat, than un-free and over-stuffed, as someone once wrote [4]. 

 

However, like Nietzsche, I would also counsel taking things slowly, cautiously. 

 

For if, like Sabina, you want to learn how to fly, then you must first learn how to stand and to walk and to run and to climb. And to do that, you need to develop strong legs and that means remaining true to the earth and practicing a little weight training.     

     

 

Notes

 

[1] Written in 1982, in Czech, as Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, it was first published in a French translation as L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être (Gallimard, 1984). That same year, it was also translated into English from Czech by Michael Henry Heim and published by Harper & Row in the US and Faber and Faber in the UK. 

 

[2] The novel also introduces us to Sabina's other lover, Franz - a kindly academic and idealist who might have been better advised to stick to his books and not get mixed up with women like Sabina - and a smiling, cancer-ridden dog belonging to Tomáš and Tereza who, for all their flaws, love this poor mutt and so pass what for Kundera is the true moral test of mankind; namely, whether one can or cannot display kindness for those creatures at one's mercy.

 

[3] Kundera is aware that this debate within philosophy between those who favour weight and those who champion lightness is as old as the Greek hills and can be traced back to the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides (who thought the latter positive and the former negative).

 

[4] See the post entitled 'On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird' (10 Oct 2015): click here.  

With thanks to Thomas Bonneville for providing the insight into Kundera's animal-based ethics.

 

 

Reflections on the Typewriter 1: The Case of Martin Heidegger

Heidegger at his desk sans typewriter 

I mentioned in a note to a recent post that Heidegger was no fan of the typewriter; that he believed it tore writing away from the domain of the hand, which, along with the word from which it sprang, is the essential distinction of Dasein.

It is neither coincidental nor accidental, says Heidegger, that modern man - enframed as he is by technology - should sit before a keyboard and write with a machine (first the typewriter, then the computer). Now the word is no longer able to come and go by means of the writing hand; it's processed and passed along by mechanical forces, becoming merely an item of information and communication. This not only endangers thinking, it threatens the destruction of the world. 

Today, says Heidegger, the handwritten text is not only regarded as antiquated, it is undesirable; something which, full of individual character, disturbs the homogeniety of the professional and commercial world and disrupts the ability of the reader to read quickly with the eye alone. The person who still writes by hand today is seen as either a loser, a madman, or a rebel; carrying a pen is almost as suspect as carrying a concealed weapon.

When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, concludes Heidegger, and transferred to the machine, "a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man" - and this wasn't a change for the better, no matter what advantages or conveniences were gained.

Should we, therefore, abandon the typewriter and the computer and the mobile phone with which we text and tweet and begin again to write by hand? Or is it not already too late; has technology not become so entrenched in our history and evolution - so much part of ourselves - that it is now of little or no importance that a few eccentrics choose to renounce and avoid it?

See: Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 80-81 and 85-86. Click here to read the relevant sections online. 

To read part two of this post on Derrida, click here. 

To read part three of this post on Nietzsche, click here.