To adequately describe an encounter with Winston Roeth’s work is difficult. One becomes acutely aware that any immediate associations might easily slip towards superficiality, unjustly betraying one’s inimitable experience of the quiet, yet lively, presence of the work.
Roeth (born 1945, Chicago) is a contemporary artist working with a reduced painting vocabulary in which the central concerns are the phenomenology of colour, light and space. Roeth’s formative years as an art student at the University of Illinois, University of New Mexico and the Royal Academy of Art, London were during the 1960s—the advent of Minimalism in America which brought to the fore elements of repetition, a reduction of subjectivity, geometry, temporality, materiality, seriality and phenomenological experience. Roeth has cited early influences including Ad Reinhardt, Brice Marden and Robert Ryman, not necessarily aesthetically, but rather intellectually in their enquiry of painting. For Roeth, the challenge lies in expanding this lineage, which he does effectively through combining the stringency of minimalist structures with the sensuality of exquisite colour.
Roeth is known for various ongoing bodies of work—grids, bi-chrome panels where an ‘interior’ form is bordered by a differently coloured ‘exterior’ band, and multicoloured slate tiles arranged into groupings of horizontal lines, rectangular grid configurations or totem-like vertical structures. Regardless of the structure, Roeth’s intent is to explore the interaction between colour (pigment) and light on a material surface to create spatial depth, illusion and kinesis (movement of the plane), thereby questioning notions of perception.
Roeth’s exhibition of sparsely installed recent paintings at Jensen Gallery, Sydney comprised three slate panel works and six tempera paintings on honeycomb panel or dibond aluminium. The exhibition was lit with filtered natural light from five overhead skylights