DUNCAN WYLIE

A chaotic construction reflective of the shared human experience. By creating entropy, Wylie finds consistencies. It’s the breaking of images apart that allows for the unfolding of new ones.

Originating from Zimbabwe, and now working and living between London and Paris, Wylie’s work returns to the unfolding narratives of displacement and memory. Spending much of his childhood and adolescence in the corridors of the National Gallery in Harare, where his mother was a curator, Wylie’s paintings holds remnants of its modernist architecture.

At the risk of losing their family home by the government’s decree, Wylie experienced and draws many references to the political transformations brought about by the then president, Robert Mugabe. His paintings are rooted within the personal experience which allows for a sensitivity to the displacement faced by many in the world. Understanding it as historically complex, and acknowledging its universal occurrence, Wylie is attentive to the layered realities of systemic collapse. His paintings reflect a sensitisation to the loss and search for one’s sense of ‘home’. Operating from his current diasporic positionality, he contends with the image in painting, distrusting its faithfulness to translate reality.

His practice is an ongoing investigation, an interruption and revisitation. A throwing up and a reflecting back. Bulimic in how he crams and purges information on the canvas, Wylie digs up the truth he tries to find in his paintings by destroying and recreating them. From using different geographic image references to adding a fresh layer of paint after leaving another for a while, he uses scattered perspectives and layers of oil paint to explore the constant tension between order and chaos.

Just watch Wylie paint. Wylie is this point of collision, a meeting of different worlds and finding navigation within the in-between. A chaotic construction reflective of the shared human experience. By creating entropy, Wylie finds consistencies. It’s the breaking of images apart that allows for the unfolding of new ones.