Rohan Wealleans
YEAR OF RESIDENCY
March - June 2008
Rohan Wealleans' monstrous creations morph and bleed between painting and sculpture. Their wild and unruly appearance gives the impression that the artist has grown them in a subterranean lair through a mixture of wizardry and weird science rather than having created them in a white-walled studio. Embarrassingly tactile, the gnarls, knobs and bejewelled facets that either sprout from the wall or create caverns, recesses and bulbous protrusions call up mysterious voids and a grotesque fertility.
Wealleans layers paint on to fibreglass and polystyrene, cutting back into these architectonic layers in a technique that resembles millefiori glass work in which the multicoloured patterns of glass rods are only viewable from their cut ends. Segments are sliced from one surface and added to another in a joyful accretion of colour and texture. His paintings can amass up to 80 layers of paint, resulting in a psychedelic, visceral, fascinating and at times repulsive surface.
Artist Edition
Rohan Wealleans
Untitled
2008
Fabrino Rag paper
790 x 1090mm (framed)
$4,200
Contact us to purchase this edition.
Rohan Wealleans
Thing
2008
mixed media
310 x 225 x 90mm
Collection of McCahon House Trust
Photo: Meg Porteous
Parehuia Residency studio occupied by Wealleans, 2008