Profile: Roger Myles

In his first year out of art school Roger Myles has put together his debut solo exhibition, due to open this month at BMG Art. Director of BMG Trudyanne Brown says, “They are elegant, assured pieces executed with confidence. There is a distinct rhythm to his compositions that reflect his experience as an architect. All these qualities are tempered by a very disciplined and restrained palette. I find his work very exciting.” Myles will present six paintings, which are a departure from the work that won him the San& Remo Best New Talent Visual Arts Award at the 2014 Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition. Without the restrictions that come with art school, Myles has been able to broaden his practice. “I have moved from a slightly less gestural approach to abstract painting into a more formalist technical approach,” he says. Myles likes to work in series, or suites within series. This exhibition will feature paintings which are informed by Myles’ interpretation of an architectural motif from 20th century Modernism. Myles says: “Working in a series I expand and develop ideas and concepts but limit them to a single strategy. So the motif you could say is a strategy and it’s now limited because I’m not going beyond that in this suite.” Myles’ paintings are process driven, it’s about the meaning in making the work rather than the narrative. “My work essentially relies on the making of the painting and then working through the pictorial problems the painting presents to itself. I am solving the problems, composing and making all at once from almost the position of non-objectivity,” he explains. “There is no image, there is no model, there is no direct reference to anything in my work.” Myles’ work, in a broader sense, is influenced by his background in architecture especially in terms of his use of space and light. “It’s to do with space, the physicality of space, how I read space, how I walk through space, how I interact with space. I think these paintings have a spatial quality about them,” he explains. “Light also plays a part in the medium of the painting. It’s not just dead flat. That reflective light allows you to read it, you can walk around it, it changes.” The paintings are partially framed as Myles considers the entire painting including the edges which he sees as being just as important as the rest of the work. He says, “I don’t justsimply extend the pictorial plane to the edge, when I get to the edge, the edge now informs the painting. I do things at edges. The partial frame informs the overall composition of the painting.” Myles’ latest works are more tectonic in form. Working in layers, he is approaching them in a more considered way. “There is a degree of unmaking in all of my work. When I am working on it as part of the process, it’s process driven. If I’m not happy about some compositional aspect of it, or whatever it might be, I will strip it back and redo it but in these works it becomes slightly more of a controlled process as opposed to the earlier works.” Roger Myles BMG Art Friday, December 12 to Wednesday, December 24 bmgart.com.au