Campbell Kneale: Silence One

CAMPBELL KNEALE has become synonymous with earshattering volume and over the last 15 years he has cultivated an extensive international following for his particular methods of systematically reassembling the hearing range of audiences. Conversely, Campbell’s paintings are a deeply quiet act, with corresponding silent results that function as a ‘pause’ or a ‘rest’ within a creative process that involves an intimidating amount of noise.

‘SILENCE ONE’ represents the pinnacle of early explorations of the fullness of emptiness, battles with noise, and discovering ‘the silent’ within a world increasingly unable to function without electronic mediation. Drawing influence from the silent arcs of cosmological phenomena, automatic writing, hermeticism, and second-hand Zen books, Campbell’s intuitive processes allow the paintings to find their own form, whilst celebrating the habitual and the repetitive. Given their proper due, habit and repetition are transformed into meditative energies where ideas of authorship are relaxed and the noise of their own spontaneity is hushed into laser-guided improvisations whose hazy margins are held in check by the restrictions and habits of the body.

Campbell Kneale: Silence One
The Russian Frost Farmers Gallery
Fri 27th August
2 Eva street, Wellington 6pm