Robert Rooney, Le Rire: At the Dentist (Picq), contemporary art, painting, dentistry
Summary
More than 30 years ago, in 1986, Melbourne-born artist Robert Rooney said, 'I have always preferred to work from secondary sources, particularly mass-media ones, rather than [to] paint or draw from the actual subject'. While also a photographer and conceptual artist, Rooney continued to find inspiration for his paintings in secondary sources. These ranged over everyday material such as cereal boxes, crafting patterns and suburban signage, as well as sources less familiar to viewers. In the early 1990s he introduced viewers to obscure children's books, and in the series from which this work comes, 'Le Rire: Homage to Picq and Friends' (2006), his paintings find their origin in a satirical French journal.
'Le Rire', meaning 'laughter', was founded in 1894, amid anti-government sentiment that was kindled by the political scandal of Dreyfus Affair; it was published until the 1950s, before appearing again briefly in the 1970s. In 1999, Rooney came across nine issues of the journal in a second-hand bookshop. He said he was attracted by the many precisely drawn cartoons of Picq – and as it turns out Tayvar and Nitro too – but Rooney also saw a happy coincidence in that he was born in 1937, when most of the nine issues were published. The tone and precision of Picq's cartoons find a natural ally in Rooney's painterly style. His crisp, bold, bright and uncompromising aesthetic pulls the cartoons off the flat surface of the page, as this work attests, and it also declares the artist's modernist birthright.
