Blue Chased Out Yellow

“Living in Los Angeles with its reliably blue skies I am attuned to seeing shocks of colour and light in the streets; the sudden brilliance of a red car bumper or the sun turning an advertising hoarding silver. But visiting Megan Rooney’s exhibition Echoes & Hours in June was nevertheless a wonderful surprise: an artist making paintings rich with colour and reflecting the constantly shifting weather in London, where they were created over the past year.

Beginning on the summer solstice, Rooney said that “it is no coincidence that my show opened on the longest day of the year, as light conditions impact how I paint and respond to colour”.

The exhibition features entirely new work. I felt this poignantly, on entering the galleries at Kettle’s Yard, met with the smell of fresh paint: acrylic and oil, with lingering pastel. We are invited to enter and feel the works with our full selves and senses.

The show comprises of chapters. In the two main galleries: a family of large-scale abstract paintings (the width being the reach of Rooney’s outstretched arms) developed over the last year, and a temporary floor to ceiling mural painted on site to respond to the specificity of Jamie Fobert’s architecture and the natural light of the space. Gravitating around these anchor works, are a dance performance about the story of a moth and a spider entitled Spin Down Sky, a large-scale painting installed in the modern extension of the house (Old Sky Blue, 2024) and smaller works on paper in The Research Space. All these works seem to reveal light, act in dialogue with events and elements, and speak of transitions.

Megan Rooney paints from and with motion, reinvigorating abstraction from her background in dance and performance. As she says “I wield colour more than I select it. Colour is radical, evasive and entirely enigmatic, with a mind of its own”. Colours chase each other, and pull us to move around the pieces, jumping from viridian green to lemon yellow, alizarin orange to ultramarine. There are no benches to rest on or recommended viewing points, we are invited to shift our point of view as we navigate the experience across a family of paintings in conversation with each other.

Embodied experience is consistently important in Rooney’s work. It holds the weight of time and experience. Each mark is a story and calls for a response. Rooney paints as much by addition as subtraction. The work has its own ecosystem, and sometimes reveals itself in reverse. It is built like a palimpsest, with layers added and removed, painted in and scrubbed out. It stands still when nothing can be removed or added. As Rooney says, “paintings overtake me in their making, they manifest their own direction”.

The site-specific mural was painted in 18 days, with Rooney working on her own in the gallery right up to the opening date. She talks about the making of this work as if it was a conversation between mind, body, memory and colour. It is deeply gestural and shows the traces of her body arching around the movement of large brushes and mark-making tools, at floor level and from a cherry picker for height. Dangerous, messy work where the walls become a dance partner. The initial intent for the mural was for it to be “warm and yellow, reflecting a change from spring to summer. But in the end colour rebelled and blue chased out yellow”. Rooney was moved by blue, from the rainy days of spring outside the gallery as she painted, to the discovery of a blue room in Pompeii at the same time. Blue took hold, had a mind of its own, and that’s how Rooney’s radical work in abstraction connect the passages of time across many past and present times. Back in California I can still feel and see in my mind the energetic sweeps of shimmering colour on canvas and on the gallery walls of Kettle’s Yard. While still enjoying this hugely ambitious exhibition, I can’t wait to see what Rooney does next.”

Sabine Jaccaud

Sabine Jaccaud is a former member of the Kettle’s Yard Committee, a current member of the gallery’s Finance and Risk Committee and a Patron.