Neil Rumming
originally published by Karen Lovegrove Gallery | Los Angeles

Neil Rumming’s new paintings are hallucinogenic compositions. An interweaving of inebriating visions and cultural references which represent the obscure signs and ciphers of the world. They speak to us with a preverbal immediacy. These day-glo canvases are the manifestations of a quicksilver messenger bringing us revelations of the present like a 24-hour news ticker. Rumming creates a rolling dialogue. A referential helter-skelter which whiplashes us from high modernism and Medusa via natural history, rock paraphernalia and corporate logos- all filtered through an acid mushroom cloud. These dizzyingly clipped voices seem to repeat over and over ‘there’s more where that came from’ in a breathless mantra.


‘Eyeball Anthology’ 2003 is a cosmic triptych. Layered fragments emerge like an after image burnt into the retina. Malevich’s ‘Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying’ 1915 appears like a test card for machine age transcendentalism. But here the colour balance is boosted to the max. The vibrant shapes float in a white void, adrift in the ether, in defiance of gravity. Malevich’s supremacy of pure feeling and perception elevated over infinity. Alongside, a dolphin makes an improbable leap into the outer reaches of the atmosphere. An alternate universe complete with tie-dye backdrop is fused with all the escapism of a teenager’s bedroom poster. Keith Haring appears as a frazzled reference. A nuclear epiphany. An indiscriminate explosion scattered across taut pungently coloured surfaces. Significance fades as we take different paths through Rumming’s paintings. The cacophony of styles reverberates. The promiscuous intermingling of signs allows us a moment of adolescent freedom to imagine. ‘Can you see it?’


The eye reappears resplendent in the center of ‘The Majestic Lodge’ 2003. This is the All Seeing Eye of providence complete with mascara. Our thoughts, words and actions may be hidden from the eyes of man but the All Seeing Eye pervades the inner most recesses of the human heart. Check your dollar bills. The Illuminati. The Grand Cabal filling the gold outline of a royal warrant. The blind leading the blind. But where is the artist amidst all this baroque grooviness? He is at the back of a biology class conscientiously rendering rock band logos. Academic it ain’t. This is the bottom up philosophy of a 2am stoned conversation. Of too much time spent playing pinball. This is thrill seeking painting where hand eye co-ordination is king. Drawn from the amusement arcade and other contrived packaged places this is expression as a dynamic prototype that could be absorbed and proffered again. Whether we are faced with a fraternal altar, a science fiction vignette, old snake eyes or a pair of lovebirds there is an intensified recognition of the spectacle of modern life. Rumming’s paintings appeal to the feverish buzz of society’s cosmopolitan splendor, without ignoring the trashy, accessible pleasures of its tawdry, lowbrow banality. They inhabit a world in which art, like all forms of artifice, provides more than a pleasant diversion at the end of our workday.


Alun Rowlands | 2004