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In his series, '4.30 Weekdays' Roderick Bunter parades this year's women-Laetitia, Anita, Sascha, Nikkala, Emma, Holly, Tara and Reese are sprawled across the room. Larger than life, they stare intensely, luring their audience with their glamour and lusciousness.
Like a perfect mimic, Bunter renders printed pixilation into verisimilar pointillism. Working against the instantaneous production of mass popular cultural forms like the fashion magazine, he reconstructs existing images through intricate, free-form dot oil paintings. These markings are delicately hued with different tones of black, rendering a unique representation of each of the women's images from an already multi-copied self.
An obsessive receptor of mass culture, Bunter describes his daily routine as being punctuated by soap operas, and regulated by hours spent meticulously painting whilst listening to tunes. A song played repeatedly becomes part of the painting's title alongside a tally of the hours consumed applying oils, for example, Sascha 72 .. . (the blurred crusade). The notoriety of the subjects is emphasised by the omission of surnames: it is assumed that all will know Reese (Witherspoon) and Holly (Valance). With similar sultry expressions, it is only the eyes of these images that divulge a hint of individuality and emotion. The remainder of their faces appear as they would in printed form -digitally whitewashed through the nip-and tuck of fashion magazines.
Bunter's intentions are questionable when one is confronted with women's representations so obviously derived from the same gene pool of unattainable Caucasian beauty. The artist's past works do attest to a calculated, disruptive practice that has heavily critiqued the nature of mass produced ideals and ideas. His decade-long artistic trajectory has seen him move from anticorporate commentary, such as that produced... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline