Darren Wardle’s haunting paintings of abandoned buildings and structures appear to be drawn from a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi dystopia. Using a variety of painting techniques, the works are awash with a synthetic and intense florescent palette that seems to radiate with nuclear fallout. The works adopt the visual language of ruin aesthetics to speculate upon the philosophical implications of ruination in the 21st century. Wardle’s regular use – and abuse – of Modernist architecture, furniture and artwork hint at a failure of the movement’s aesthetic and its associated belief in a rational and orderly world.
Wardle’s latest series of interiors resemble plausible spaces, but operate more like constructed artificial ruins that comment on structural instability, suggesting the failure and corruption of modernism and the inevitability of decay. In this newest body of work the ruins of modernism have been replaced by the detritus of the everyday, or trash culture – broken consumer objects, hard rubbish, obsolete icons from popular culture, old mattresses and kitsch posters depicting mystical new age animals. Although devoid of any obvious figurative presence there is the suggestion of potential inhabitants.
Wardle depicts the realm of squatters, eclectic share-houses, dysfunctional teens and lone conspiracy theorists. He employs a much more low-rent, or no-rent, aesthetic than in previous work, which is then amplified by lurid splashes of colour, walls dripping with paint, layers of graffiti and paint spattered floors. In this series the mattresses is a repeated motif. It is emblematic of the unconscious dream states, rest and sites of intimate contact; exposing the stained history of our basic needs as they re-circulate through urban space. The works represent physical and metaphorical ruin. They celebrate high modernism in order to comment on the world in which we currently live: high consumerism, and are a visual representation of the fine line between utopia and dystopia.
Fehily Contemporary
until 8 October, 2016
Melbourne
Untitled, 2016, oil and acrylic on linen, 153 x 153cm
Courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary Incorporated by Mossgreen, Melbourne
