source: ffotogalleryorg

The starting point for Roland Hicks’ work is always the photograph, and while his images are rendered in paint, the photographic aesthetic and the ‘decisive moment’ are inextricably embodied in his vibrant and beguiling paintings. The subject of these works are often discarded or unnoticed objects from everyday life; a tube of squirming toothpaste, bubbles on the top of a washing up bottle or the flickering glow of a light bulb. More recently he has begun to study the way in which discarded items can take on a new life, frozen in time and forensically recorded as if a new organic specimen, open to multiple interpretations. His latest paintings concentrate on the phantasmagorical nature of chewing gum as it stretches between pavement and the bottom of a shoe. Banal as this may sound, the resulting pictures take on an animated and awkward beauty that foregrounds the tension of the painted surface with its original photographic source. This symbiotic relationship is summed up by Hicks as such:

Despite a pervading sense of time held static in a photographic moment, I think ultimately the dynamic of my painting is restless, hovering between the worlds of painting and photography, of solids and liquids, triumph and tragedy, the sensual and the mundane, of Hollywood and the kitchen sink.

Roland Hicks was born in Aldershot in 1967 and studied at Winchester School of Art and Slade School of Art, London. He has exhibited extensively in London and his work is represented in the Saatchi Collection and in numerous private collections in Europe and the US.