Empty gasometers backlit by some raging conflagration loom over a landscape raked by searchlights... enmeshed, claustrophic and threatening. A maze of bulkheads, grills, gigantic rotors, smashed windows is negotiated by dark human figures.
These are Dee Taylor's Imaginative themes. Like Tate Modern's recent turbine hall exhibition "TH.2058" by French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Taylor's paintings draw on the literature and films of futuristic dystopias, but brings the vision closer to our present time. The shapes, configurations and ordering of space bring to mind the great Fernand Leger. But if these paintings reference Leger it is a Leger where the ordering of space has been usurped by machines in an age of darkness.
As the social and architectural infrastructure crumbles, the technology of domination, surveillance and control increases exponentially. This is the great irony of progress depicted in large, powerful canvases that initially dominate the viewer in a way that parallels the imagined tyrannies of the near future.
Please click on the picture for a detailed view to appreciate the remarkable colouring and techniques used in this piece.
