2010 DARREN WARDLE: WET-LOOK CAPITALSTYLE

EXHIBITION IMAGES

Darren Wardle’s exquisitely executed paintings of abandoned architectural structures explore the extended possibilities of the painting process with his seamless nearly cinematic landscapes. Using Modernist architecture to explore spatial illusion as well as to elaborate a vision of contemporary consciousness, he brings obsessive detail to his depictions of surfaces, furniture, and other decorative elements in a given space. The resulting interiors, like that of Design Anxiety, seem schizophrenic in their attributes, and, along with the shifting perspectives he often employs within a single picture plane, give a portrait of the loneliness and confusion of contemporary existence as well as the failure of Modernism as a cohesive aesthetic movement. Human presence is implied by its absence amongst his abandoned spaces and interiors. The artifice of these hyper-real spaces is heightened by Wardle’s trademark use of extremely synthetic colour, a delirious counterpoint to the austerity of much Modernist architecture, like the return of the repressed within its ‘chromophobic’ aesthetic. Wet-look Capital Style is Wardle’s second solo exhibition with Sullivan Strumpf Fine Art.

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. For the past few years Wardle has divided time between Australia and USA, spending half of his year in Melbourne and the other half of the year in New York, where his recent solo exhibition at the Stephan Stoyanov Gallery was well received. Last year he was also invited to complete a two month residency at New York’s Flux Factory, an experience he will being revisiting later this year. 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 & the USA