Selwyn Rodda

Biological Building Blocks

16 February - 12 March 2011

Selwyn Rodda champions the landscape painting genre into the 21^st Century with a new series of lush oil paintings. Rodda’s works bear the compositional and suggestive trademarks of a traditional landscape. Present are a foreground, a source of light, a dappled cloud in the sky, a smouldering hillock in the background. However these paintings are no Turners or Glovers. They are closer to a mad scientist’s nod to the surrealist biomorphic paintings of French 20^th Century artist Yves Tanguy, or the amorphous forms of Jean Arp.

In a montage of sickly sweet colours Rodda’s subjects breathe, grow and retract. They are essentially abstract forms, however they infer a greater living structure. The works suggest a biomorphic phantasy world channelled from the palette of Rodda’s subconscious, borne from a fascination with biology and plant life.

In the words of the artist;

‘They are, in a sense, rehearsals for the possible, dreamed for, reawakening of those emotional states that seemed saturated with wholesome meaning and yet mysterious as all hell.’ SR

Rodda trained at the Prahran college of Art in 1986. He subsequently studied Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, completing a Post Graduate Diploma in 1993 under the tutelage of well known Australian artists including Gareth Sansom, Louise Hearman, Steve Cox and Rick Amor. After a 7 year stint exhibiting in group shows at Fitzroy’s Fringe Gallery (1987 - 1990) Linden Centre for Contemporary Art (1993) the Old Tolarno Gallery (1993) and Latrobe Regional Gallery (1999) and solo shows at Westspace (1998) and Bulle Gallery (2000), Rodda retreated from the fickle art world. He instead turned to visual music, an area where he has found great success and has completed visual music for SONY, Qantas and the NGV. When looking at his recent paintings one can imagine the soundscape that might exist in a Selwyn Rodda landscape, one of gurgles and bubbles, soothing belches and sickly sweet harmonies - it seems a logical marriage of artforms for Rodda to pursue.

Bursting back into the Melbourne art scene in 2010 Rodda was ‘rediscovered’ by artist Steve Cox on a ubiquitous social networking page. Impressed by his painterly prowess, Rodda was then chosen by Steve to participate in an artist curated exhibition at John Buckley Gallery Deepening the Game. The response to Rodda was palpable. Many of his paintings found their way into important private collections and building on the success of this, Rodda has been steadily preparing for his first solo exhibition in 15 years.

For a list of works, please contact the gallery This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.