Jeffrey Dennis. TRACES OF OCCUPATION

About

Selected exclusively from work made over the last three years it represents a clear demonstration of his enduring faith in a unique and idiosyncratic painterly language that took root in his work in the 80s and which he has developed and refined for over thirty years.

A Jeffrey Dennis painting, or one of his painted objects, is instantly recognisable: the surface is built up slowly, layer upon layer, with small marks, rich and varied in colour and texture to resemble a foaming layer or ‘bubblescape’. And into this bubblescape he weaves a network of tubular structures and wires interspersed with fragments of reality that are taken from film-stills, newspaper and magazine photographs or his favoured 70s catalogue of furniture and building components and materials. We may even find bus or underground tickets, cinema tickets or even discarded material found in the street, indeed anything that causes a chain of interrelated reactions or a linking narrative across the surface as he interrogates a particular idea or theme that has sparked off his imagination.