richardboyddunlop.co.nz

In Richard Boyd-Dunlop’s recent practice, dense rhythms and repetitions of form invoke the connection we experience through our shared cultural referents. His work expresses how our currencies, which so often include the pop cultural material that we’ve all assimilated and loved in its various forms, the comics, cartoons and arcade games, are in some sense tribal and reach beyond mere product or commodity to become shared symbols, a lingua franca.

The starting point for Boyd-Dunlop’s work is that form of drawing that is closest to dreaming, doodling. Its freewheeling associations overrun boundaries to move simultaneously in all directions. He describes his working method as one where each painting has been generated by the narratives of the one before it; in this way the works constitute something like the screengrabs of a constantly mutating, recombinant project.