Hales Gallery is pleased to present Slow Dazzle, Roger Kelly's first major solo show in London since 2002.

The title refers to Kelly's deliberate and wilful eroding of any clear point of access that would provide the viewer with a reading of these new works made especially for this show.

Since completing the Chelsea school of art MA in 1997 and subsequently taking part in the John Moore's painting prize 20 and 21 and East International, Roger Kelly, became known for his intricate, large scale landscape paintings, drawing particularly on a tradition beginning with the British 2^nd world war artist Paul Nash, among others from that period.

Whilst some of Nash's work focused on the destruction caused by bombing as subject matter, Kelly's early work has looked more to impending ecological disaster.

Kelly's new works have lost nothing of the air of foreboding but are no longer obvious depictions in which landscape operates in a traditional manner. Instead, over a period of years, Kelly has collected together photographic images which he has then collaged and photo-shopped so that all conventional orientation is lost.

Kelly's collection of subject matter includes destroyed buildings, natural disasters, landfill, toxic waste dumps, war torn landscapes, obscure N.A.S.A experiments and the debris of the collapsed, overgrown and ravaged. The images are either blended together seamlessly or left rough as brutal juxtapositions so that they slip in and out of contextual and material logic.

These pictorial constructs are further distanced from their source and act as material for intricate linear drawings. This process condenses and empties out all of the tonal qualities and reduces the visual information to a plan or map from which the painting can be made.

Kelly then begins the rigorous process of actually making the resulting abstractions on primed linen. Given the subject matter that Kelly has chosen to begin the process of his pictorial creations, the results are surprisingly delicate.

The finished works are contradictorily both wild and muted at the same time, giving them a further twist to their odd logic.

Roger Kelly's paintings are included in numerous private collections in Britain, Europe and the USA.