Rococo Vanitas No.2 Simon Grennan

Size (cm): 115 x 89
pencil on rag paper
This work emerges from a body of work that folds rule-based procedures into perceptual and representational drawing processes. One method used here, drawing with multiple pencils simultaneously, produces rhythms, vibrations, misregistrations, and repeated gestures and patterns that naturally converge upon, or gravitate towards, certain motifs and spaces – in this case, an ornate rococo-styled interior. Further layering (of its opposite perhaps: ocean wave patterns) creates a complicated but integrated linear entanglement of architecture, nature, space, and surface. Together with the wry depiction of posed human skeletons, the drawing further entangles the society portrait with horror vacui (fear of the empty) and the vanitas still life tradition which together I hope create a strangely appropriate expression of the Anthropocene.