DARREN MUNCE

Twittering Machines

31 May - 22 June 2024

Darren Munce’s works are an encounter with visual attention and material presence, offering painted surfaces that have been willed into an open resolution. From a distance there is a deep understanding of colour explored through the arrangement of interlocking planes. On approach, great variations of texture gain clarity, the stacked and rolled application of pigment marking the time inherent in making these works. Individual paintings land with a variety of resolutions, dynamic and palpable, ever-shifting or folding through modes.

Munce likes the physical pushback of the stretched support but then coats the canvas with mediums to a smooth finish as he begins to develop forms. The depths of these surfaces, their planar shifts and careful layers are referential assemblages. We are invited to connect a form or a colour relationship with our own visual experiences, much as Munce collects references from daily life and notes them in his studio sketchbooks:

“Riding to work, I’ll see a jumper, or a shape on the ground, trousers, something. That will filter into the paintings at a point”.

The sketches may be a starting point for a new work or used to move things along when a work is at an impasse. He will call on these ideas to drive a painting forward before the visual cue shuffles back beneath the primacy of the material experience. Some works nod to pictorial modes, like ‘Giorgio’s Corner’, a smaller painting that Munce relates to an emptied-out urban street painted by the Greek Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. All these references land lightly enough that they can remain optional pathways through a work.

There is an affinity also with the conceptual underpinnings of collage and forms of assemblage. In the studio there may be up to five paintings in various states of play.

“I started riffing off the older paintings and pulling sections out of them that I thought would be worth investigating further. If you try to find too many things at once you tend to not get there. By having a motif to start with, a shape or form, it just allowed me to investigate the materials more rather than trying to find everything.”

Darren Munce’s studio was historically a seamstress’s workshop. It sits out the back of the family home where he can revisit paintings at night after his young children are settled. The recent time constraints have encouraged innovation with time in the studio having a more vital quality. In considering the change in family structure, the artist knew he needed to take a new approach:

“My surfaces have always been driven by action and response. That can be time-consuming, so some sort of material change to get more of a closeness that I could control was required – a direction that was stable. I started experimenting with different materials to get a textured surface rather than working with brushes…the control is different. I wanted to simplify processes without losing anything and continue to make it engaging to me and the viewer.”.

Having studied graphic design and typography in the 1990s, concepts of deconstruction are embedded in the artist’s work. A background in signwriting and screen printing technically offers him great control over colour dynamics and material experimentation.

For the current show, the works have been thoughtfully described as “pigment and binders on canvas” to capture the broad range of mediums, applications and tools used. This scope allows for variations in transparency and texture, outcomes the artist describes in contrasts like sticky, waxy, or fluff.

The artist notes that the Twittering Machines of the exhibition title could reflect the various opinions about when a work is finished (or the judging mind of the artist in the studio as a painting sits on the edge of resolve). The phrase is the title of a key painting by modernist Paul Klee, an artist Munce regards as a guiding light. Klee’s scratchy linework of mechanised birds are applied as an oil transfer and behave like a monoprint on a complex underpainting of watercolour and ink wash. The work is quite visually distinct from Munce’s approach but there is a shared sense of surface complexity and a playful testing of the veracity of the picture plane.

The artist describes a generative action in the making of the current paintings, referring to the post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The artist encapsulates this as, “The machine is a machine connected to another machine, with all expressions part of the same flow but with each instance offering a point of difference.” We might then link this to how assemblage can work in painting, where diverse elements within a painting allow for emergent qualities that cannot be found in any of the elements when taken singularly.

Darren Munce’s eye for the referential in colour and material (as well as title and shape) invite us to operate these works as machines of open-ended assemblage. Each painting’s material presence is further activated through the interactive speculations and visual understandings of the engaged viewer.

Exhibition essay by Melody Willis.