BEACH FLAMES & FINE LINES

Niagara Gallery, Toronto, 2006

Exhibition text - excerpts

by Susie Major

The works that comprise BEACH FLAMES & FINE LINES by Montreal artist Sarah Rooney herald a lyrical movement in contemporary painting. This movement is expressive, intelligent and considered. It is captured, held and released in Rooney’s new works. The paintings, as well as the title of this exhibition, evoke a particular blend of the elemental and the experiential. (…)

(…) These deft paintings are what time, space, material, and gesture do. They consolidate tongues, territories and experiences. Painted in oil and acrylic on cotton, canvas and wood panel, these works carry the lessons of modernist, post modernist, and contemporary painting. For example, Rooney’s use of color and light in Capitão Zajão (2005) and Après le patin (2005) evokes early Impressionist experiments; One and Half Cyprus (2005) displays the expressivity of Abstraction, and Jacaranda (2006) demonstrates the contemplative confidence of the Colour-field painters. Pos sas léne (what is your name) (2006), Swing (2005) and Swung (2006) underscore the ambiguity of notions of identity and place while articulating the liminal space between modes of representation and modes of translation. (…)

Sarah Rooney’s paintings pivot between control and chance, personal experience, instinct and expression. They appear as much touched, or inhaled and exhaled, as painted. Her technical use of under-painting unearths the image and brings out a sense of depth that hovers our gaze between form and space, background and foreground. Rooney sensitizes our ‘eye’ by applying specific and random points of colour to guide us through her idiosyncratic logic of near and far, holding on and letting go. BEACH FLAMES & FINE LINES conveys a sense of tension and ease; some paintings seem to open, others seem to compress. Others do both via their layers of opacity and transparency working in correspondence and in flux. Rooney’s focal shifting of visual elements entices our vision into a slow stimulating rhythm, a rhythm that gives these paintings the capacity to move us.     – Susie Major 2006