Rhys Coren: What is Love?
Inspired by memories of the first album he ever bought, Coren attempts to use drawing as a means to understand his 30 year relationship with the tracks.
The presence of a single piece of music, song, album or band in someone’s life can be a continuum; as you grow and change, the music comes in and out of focus, evoking a range of polarising emotions.
Through the visual elements of line, pattern and an exploration of colour combinations as chord progressions, these new works attempt to piggyback on the power that music has on Coren and the involuntary responses it evokes. To better understand his connection to the music, Coren began by drawing the lyrics over and over again.
Coren; “I wrote out some of the lyrics from the song 'What is Love' (1990) from Deee-Lite's World Clique album, then started to trace over them, then trace the trace, then trace the trace of the trace and so on. I repeated this for weeks, building a muscle memory for each part of each letter of each word. allowing the words to morph and take on new characteristics, but gradually enough that the images still retained the essence of the meaning of each word; Degorgeous, Dewithit, Degroovy, Define, Delectable.”
Then I began to collage all these various traces together, retracing and building on sections with a visual resonance that mimics sound reverberation. There are echoes and ghosts. The palette is something I've been developing for some time, putting the colour combinations I encounter in daily life through a Josef Albers filter.”
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Film
Rhys Coren
DD – Paper and Image: 39.2 x 55.6 cm - 15 3/8 x 21 7/8 in
LL – Paper and Image: 41.0 x 52.1 cm - 16 1/8 x 20 1/2 in
Edition of 25
Rhys Coren
Paper and Image: 99.0 x 137.5 cm - 39 x 54 1/8 in
Edition of 25
Rhys Coren
Paper and Image: 45.0 x 144.0 cm - 17 3/4 x 56 3/4 in
Edition of 25
Rhys Coren was born in Plymouth, UK, in 1983. The artist graduated from the University of West England, Bristol, in 2006 and completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art, at the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2016. Coren was recently commissioned to create a nine metre long public artwork made from bespoke terrazzo, displayed behind Bond Street Crossrail station in London.
