2008 DARREN WARDLE: MODULAR LIBERTIES
EXHIBITION IMAGES
Flow Slow
Urban space today typically reveals itself through the frame of a car windshield. Nineteenth Century boulevardiers have geared up and are now flaneurs in Fords. The resulting drive-by vistas - arrested moments sharply rendered against the passing blur - are also configured by another frame, that of the mind. Memory, associations, other sights from other places, all combine with the discordant collage that is the contemporary city to produce hybrid visions, reconfigured into an apparent whole within consciousness. This is the vision of postmodernity, a world of overlapping interconnections, oblique associations, simultaneous presents. Here the domestic and the public, the actual and the virtual, the solid and the transparent, interlock to elicit a giddying hallucination whose frantic velocity causes perception to overlook this condition and accept it as normal.
In Darren Wardle’s paintings, this flow is arrested and considered. The architecture of Modernity collides with the decrepitude of public infrastructure. Screens glow blankly against a luminous smudge of movement that is the sky at speed. The works slow, then screech forward. Razor-sharp edges tear past cloud drifts rendered in soft-focus hues. In all the works there is a collision of spaces, drawn from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Melbourne and Sydney – spaces that are not only increasingly becoming to resemble one other but to physically merge.
LA in particular evokes this new sense of space and Wardle has spent quite some time there. LA is not unique in this, however, it just demonstrates the symptoms of this general condition with a greater flourish. There is a curious double vision when driving through LA or Vegas, as if you have been there before. The screen of the windshield presents a vision that is like driving through a dimly recalled movie and, since both cities are also open sets for Hollywood, you probably have screened it before. But then, you have probably also seen it all before while driving in Australia or, even more disturbingly, something virtually identical. Likewise, you see it all again while looking at the Net, or while browsing magazines. Whether driving, or simply living, all these experiences of past and present, actual and virtual space, blur into a new coherence that is the modular space of post-modernity, a collage-like hyperreal condition that transports itself across times, spaces and screens. Like the hyper-modernist corridors depicted in Wardle’s small works, all these paintings are conduits that transport the viewer into contemporary world space. The paintings picture a world configured, not as it is most usually glimpsed or overlooked, but as it is actually experienced.
Dr Stephen Haley, independent writer, artist and lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, 2008
Melbourne-based artist Darren Wardle, can often be found wandering the streets of New York or Los Angeles, camera in hand, photographing the hard edged architecture and graffiti, which, when merged in Photoshop, becomes the basis for his skillfully rendered paintings. His first exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, set for December this year, comes off the back of a 6 month Australia Council residency in New York.
Straddling the Pacific Rim, Wardle’s works suggest abandoned utopian sites in the aftermath of disaster. Humans are noticeably absent. Writer Ashley Crawford has noted that Wardle’s “work renders the urban landscape caught in the midst of a nuclear blast, colours intensified to a terrifying degree. Wardle has ratcheted up his street art spray appearance with carefully applied brush-stokes. His vision of suburbia burns with radioactive intensity.
Referencing tools of production like computer programs, airbrush and conventional painting techniques; Wardle creates links between the handmade and the electronic. Frequently he is asked why he doesn’t just do a big digital print, which might be an obvious move, but seems to miss the point. The point is that it’s always about painting.
BIOGRAPHY
Since graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts, Honours) from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1997, Darren Wardle has participated in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Arts Victoria funded exhibition, U-turn; no laybys, frequent flyer points, returns or exchanges, at The Glendale College of Art Gallery, California, USA, in 2007. In 2006 Wardle received an Export and Touring Grant by Arts Victoria for a solo show at Stux Gallery in New York and in 2004 he was awarded an Australian Council for the Arts residency in LA. His works are held in significant collections including National Gallery of Victoria, Latrobe University, National Australia Bank, Artbank, BHP Billiton and private collections in Australia & USA. He has recently returned from New York and LA, having been awarded the Australia Council for the Arts, New York Studio Residency in 2007. This year Wardle is a new addition to Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art and the Luxe Gallery in New York.