In his practice, Rohan Wealleans constantly challenges his audience with works that refuse to be defined as any single genre. Traversing the boundaries between painting and sculpture, figurative and abstract, Wealleans has created an oeuvre that is highly original.
Residual Love, originally exhibited at Ivan Anthony Gallery in a 2002 exhibition of the same name, employs Wealleans’ signature technique. Numerous layers of thick house paint are carved and rolled back to expose a marble-like, multifaceted, psychedelic, candy-coloured interior. Protruding from the shiny, baby-pink surface are bulbous mounds, substantial masses that push out, threatening to erupt from the picture’s surface in their own shower of dazzling hues. The tangible depth and contrasting push and pull of these forms are simultaneously robust and intricate, engaging a dialogue between objects and painting.

Described by curator Robert Leonard as ‘pornographic abstraction’, these works reflect at once Wealleans’ fascination with B-grade ‘slasher’ horror films and his interest in exposing that which is hidden. Like flayed flesh that has been sliced and peeled back, the work is gruesome yet beautiful.

Rohan Wealleans was the winner of the 2002 Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award, in 2005 he held the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and in 2006 he was the paramount winner of the Wallace Art Awards. In addition to representation by leading New Zealand galleries, Rohan Wealleans is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney.

Sarah McCrory