Damien Roach

.....'in London-based artist Damien Roach’s Transit series, vintage landscape postcards are collaged together into fantastical new compositions. Part of the appeal was the simplicity. Sometimes, “when you put two images together, it feels like they were always meant to be that way”, he says. “It’s so obvious, yet always so strange and unexpected when you find that connection: a fully distilled and minimal action.”

'The escapist, hyper-real nature of these 1960s and 1970s images drew him in: “Super-saturated blue skies that bleed into turquoise seas, with the slightly-too-vibrant greens of trees and fields punctuating the ups and downs sketched out by the deep blues.” These landscapes, he says, “speak of aspiration and desire. Dreams of another world just a plane ride away. It’s important to remember that easyJet and Ryanair weren’t always a thing.” Added to this is how postcards reflect intimacy – through their hastily written thoughts and experiences. “Postcards are a strange knot of object and image. It’s strange that the messages people write are left exposed for all to see: the uncanny public intimacy of the postcard.” For Roach, postcards remind us that insight and meaning can be found in the discarded and humble things.'

I am so interested in this artist. This collage of postcard images is a newly imagined landscape. I will follow this line of thought when developing ‘make a path for others to follow’ to reconstruct the landscape that is outside my front door. Roach made a fantastic video of Satie’s Gymnopedies. He links lots of clips of different people playing just the first 2 chords. They occur in different keys, in different environments. It is thinking of music from another angle, another perspective, a ‘cut up’. Again, it is a bit like Gordon Matta-Clark cutting through a piece of music. Instead of just listening to a piece of music, you are suddenly thinking about environments, the performers, time.

https://www.ft.com/content/cfbc5445-fa96-4218-b4a2-c2979dd63346

http://www.seventeengallery.com/artists/damien-roach/

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