NYAB Event - Darren Wardle "Design Anxiety"

Darren Wardle "Design Anxiety"

Stephan Stoyanov Gallery

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Stephan Stoyanov Gallery presents Design Anxiety, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Darren Wardle.

Darren Wardle’s exquisitely executed paintings of abandoned Modernist structures explore the extended possibilities of the painting process with his seamless nearly cinematic landscapes.

Wardle’s unflinching approach between the sprawling environments of Australia, Los Angeles, New York and the hyper-reality freak-show of Las Vegas channel the over hyped consumerism and lifestyle hubris that fed the global economic meltdown.

Human presence is implied by its absence amongst his abandoned architectural spaces and interiors. Sometimes it's the viewer who is incorporated by metaphorically filling this void - maybe as an inhabitant or a witness, but there's an obvious physicality (through pain and injury) that brings everything back to the original foundations of architecture, and the body's relationship to space. Wardle's work excavates a dystopian current, which hooks into the failure of Utopian Modernism and the latent violence underpinning the corruption of it's aesthetic

The artifice of the architectural spaces and hyper-real environments 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.

Wardle is an artist both attracted and repelled by excess, like the impulse to look at a car accident. He then reworks what’s there already - structures like malls, luxury apartment complexes, housing estates and casinos (architectural representations of “lifestyle” that ultimately could be anywhere) - so he can live with it.

Wardle introduces an actual building material in his use of plexi-glass supports. The streamlined perfection of the black plexi-glass works are disrupted by the incorporation of reflected movement of the viewer and the mirroring of colour and form within the gallery space. A shifting dialogue is generated between painting and the viewer in real time and space.

Then there's the lone formal portrait, a beautifully done, and highly confronting image, painted in a classical manner, softly blurred, with a photographic feel. The tension-creating piece acts as a narrative key throughout the show.

Darren Wardle lives and works in Melbourne, Australia and New York City.