Elms Lesters Paintings Rooms

DALEK & DELTA

28 August - 26 September 2009
Tuesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm, Thursdays 'til 8pm

This exhibition brings together two International painters of magnitude.

James Marshall, aka DALEK, who currently lives in Carolina, and Amsterdam based Boris Tellegen, aka DELTA, are both masters of their handling of colour and texture.

Amsterdam based Boris Tellegen is showing an impressive body of new works including canvases, collages and some new 3D sculptural wall pieces from his evolving 'diversion' series..

..and juxtaposed is a selection of American artist James Marshall's meticulous geometric paintings, including a large scale, site specific installation painted during a recent residency at the gallery.

Marshall, who spent a year as an assistant to Takashi Murakami, has developed and honed a technique of meticulously applying flat blocks of colour, whilst playing with shapes and exaggerated optical perspectives.

"Two changes in technique have recently allowed DALEK to ratchet the spatial complexity up a notch. In linear terms, there’s an increased overlapping between forms whilst, in colour terms, subverting the light-to-dark or conversely dark-to-light build-up of tonal depth by interjecting chop-change colour values at will across the picture plane to break up conventional recession " Ben Jones - art historian

Conversely, Tellegen is constantly experimenting with his his complex 'architectural' paintings, collages and 3D sculptural wall pieces, discovering, through his use of colour and references to urban decay, how to play with perspectives through the build up of textures and shadows.

"There’s an openness in DELTA’s practice to organic breakdown which might at first seem antithetical to the precision of his work’s apparently precise graphic underpinning. Thinking back to one of his street pieces, with the moss proliferating and gradually covering the relief, helps point up in a rare natural example a key conceptual theme for DELTA throughout: the organic system and its threat to subsume the man-made." Ben Jones - art historian

To accompany this exhibition, Elms Lesters has published a unique two sided exhibition poster measuring 502 x 750 mm

One side features a new painting by James Marshall (DALEK) the other a detail of one of Boris Tellegen's complex paper collages. The originals of both of these works are included in the exhibition.