Painter James Rielly bewilders viewers by disorienting and distorting expectations of childhood innocence. Painting with a certain level of childish, or untrained technique, Rielly’s paintings exhibit ironies of sexualized desires and “eroticized anxieties.”[1] Hardly overt in representation, Rielly’s paintings reverse roles of adults and children to hint at social disorder and collective psychopathologic characteristics.[2] Beginning in 2003, Rielly directed his work towards a more political, as well as personal, orientation, responding to the 1966 Aberfan village mining disaster in Wales. Born in Wales, Rielly was 10 when this catastrophe struck his country, killing 116 children and 28 adults.[3] Rielly’s paintings, therefore, address the lasting effect of memory.
Rielly’s work, however, often goes misread; viewers fail to interpret his simplistic paintings as bearing historical, psychological, and emotional importance. Rather than using a traditional paintbrush, Rielly employs a palette knife as his primary tool of application, associating this technique “with amateur ‘weekend painters’.”[4] But his paintings are far from that. With a more substantial focus on black in this series, Rielly’s palette knife technique allows him to build up masses of darkness that evoke the confused, upset, outraged, and empty sensation of the coal mining disaster.[5] Rielly’s simple application of paint, ultimately, accomplishes more than a buildup of dark space; it allows for Rielly to achieve a straightforwardness of space within the canvas, resulting in a more accessible, understandable, and innately familiar sensation from the viewer. Despite inconsistent perspective or imaginary composition, these paintings draw upon fundamental artistic techniques of representation for communicative purposes. Rielly demands that the story of this disaster be conveyed objectively, not complicated by conceptual interpretations or overworked passages of color, but evoking uninfluenced, childish means of communication.
Partially Buried (2004) exhibits one of the most effective outcomes of this technique. Sitting in the foreground of the monochromatic light-lilac background is the white silhouette of a house, partially covered by an engulfing triangle of black mass, presumably coal from the mines. This painting stands static: no hope of movement, no semblance of life. Its starkness lies in the crudeness of painterly quality. As described in Modern Painters, “the simple forms hint at naivety but the sheer weight of thick swathes of black paint virtually pins the canvas against the wall.”[6] This tangible sensation of emotional weight comes through as a bit more concealed in Black Kids (2004). Rielly saturates the faces of the two children in black paint. One smiling, the other frowning, in this painting they address a preeminent childhood innocence blanketed by a demand to confront adult issues. Rielly further imparts this message through the severe juxtaposition of saturated black faces against the pastel colors of the background and children’s clothing. The remnants of this disaster are scarring; the aftermath reaches far beyond the initial sufferance.
James Rielly, Partially Buried, 2004
Oil on canvas
James Rielly, Black Kids, 2004
Oil on canvas
Installation view
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[1] Art Review.
[2] Flash Art
[4] Modern Painters
[5] Modern Painters
[6] Modern Painters
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