Rokeby presents Simon Keenleyside’s second solo exhibition at the gallery in which he continues to examine the formal and psychological possibilities of landscape.
Keenleyside’s recent paintings explore places on the fringes of his Essex home; peripheral or marginal sites. Formal devices that the artist employs in the new work are the inclusion of geometrically patterned walls, and stacked formal blocks of colour in the form of shipping containers. Both devices position themselves within the genre of abstract painting. As with the grid, the prevailing motif of Modern art, these structures are used both to explore the real and what is literally and figuratively beyond and behind that reality. And as with earlier work the new canvases resonate with the shifting spaces of personal memory, which comes in part from the artist returning to the biographical sites of his childhood.