Construction Site, 2003
oil on board, 57 x 50 cm
Private collection. On view at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, 2 February – 5 May 2024
Running through much of [Rhodes’s] oeuvre is this trio of metaphorically interchangeable terms, this trinity of Earth/Body/Painting. Organs, muscles, veins, skin and bones are continually suggested. The beautiful, strange, even fascinatingly repugnant forms, and colours and textures in the works evoke those of our own bodies, inside and out. There are bruisings, abrasions, wounds, healthy or parasitic growths, suppurations, excretions, contaminations, regenerations. Sexuality is marked in numerous forms and qualities. There are tentative, provocative or perverse touchings and interlockings. In general one can think of the make-up of these pictures as a pathology, even a gynaecology. The land is the body is the painting. Tracks across a field are trails of the brush through wet paint, are creases in the brow or palm. Topsoil is paint layer, is skin. Streaks in sand are dragged bristles through pigment, are combed hair.
Merlin James, (from Earth/Body/Painting, essay printed in the catalogue published by the National Galleries of Scotland to accompany Carol Rhodes’s solo show at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 2007-08. © the author.