Courtesy: the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.

ARC ONE Gallery presents Looking back to see if they still look back at me, an exhibition of paintings by Marina Rolfe. This is Rolfe’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Rolfe’s abstractions are a tangle of different places. Using elements from real environments, she creates new compositions that reveal themselves with each layer of paint. First, Rolfe will make a sketch, collaging disparate locations that spark visceral emotions. It could be a field of lavender, a rugged cliff face, a patch of mist, or a mountain trail. However, in the final painting, Rolfe doesn’t want you to see the lavender or the cliff or the mist. Each element has been carefully chosen for its emotional charge; erasing the specificity of place and replacing it with the sensuality of paint. Don’t look for any particular location. As Colleen Ahern, one of Rolfe’s mentors, once observed, “sometimes painting is really about the paint.”

Rolfe prefers to work in silence, so that it is just her brush, her paint, and the beat of her own pulse. In this state Rolfe is “very present.” Her mark-making straddles the line between intuition and decisiveness. Every colour, every paint stroke, feels selected and deliberate, yet taken all together they impart an overwhelming feeling of spontaneity. This powerful combination of opposites—control and improvisation—is her signature.

When Rolfe has finished a painting, she’ll ask you what you see when you look at it. She’s not analysing you. This isn’t a Rorschach test. Rolfe is curious to know what associations you make. The artist will invite you to sit and look for a long time. This is the best way to appreciate a Rolfe: imagine you are eleven years old, and you’ve got nowhere to be; you’re lying in a bed of thick, green grass with your best friend, and you’re both gazing up at the clouds. You might see a dog, the head of an elderly woman, a clenched fist, and a misty mountain. You can’t quite see the scuba diver that your friend points out, and that’s okay. Sometimes a corner of the world swells with profound meaning. And sometimes clouds are really just clouds.

Opening Event: Wednesday 15 May, 6 – 8pm.

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