In 2016, after an abstraction hiatus, Mark Rodda returned to this form of painting with a group of

works which all included the word Nebula as part of their title. The Nebula subject referred to

galactic and/or quantum mysteries and how painting can act as a simulacrum to mimic these

entities. These ideas dwell on the rhymes and similarities between the cosmic and the atomic,

the macro a the micro, the basic idea that an atom looks strangely like a solar system, and how

those clues could feed into speculation about the unknown. In 2024 Mark Rodda returned to this

theme within this new show at Gallery9, More Nebula Paintings .

The construction of these images has relied heavily on the manipulation and juxtaposition of

different states of viscosity within paint and the painting medium. Mark Rodda is interested in

the many unknowns and chaotic results involved in these interactions, to him they offer

nutritious fodder for existential meditation. Furthermore, on another level, this process seems to

create representations that you could actually think exist in the cosmos. So much so that, in a

way, they can be viewed as not abstraction at all, but figurative flights of fancy, drawn from the

themes mentioned above.

As usual with Mark Rodda exhibitions there are outlier works that slightly veer from the theme,

within this show these come in the form of two figurative paintings on canvas. These works

follow the romantic landscape themes that have been the bedrock of Mark Rodda's oeuvre over

the last few decades. The feel of these figurative images seem to share a visual bond with the

artist's new Nebula paintings, even if their aims and intentions steer in a different direction.

The abstract pieces were all created using a unique technique that has been slowly developed

by the artist over the last half decade. This is a process of painting an image in reverse (on

glass or a solid surface), peeling the finished work off that surface, flipping it, and attaching it to

a wood panel. This gives the work an unusual, almost printed surface feel which highlights

details that normal painting techniques often hide, similar to painting on glass (but without the

glass as a final support). This technique also creates the illusion that the image could be some

sort of exotic stone or marble which has been highly polished.