Juxtapoz Magazine - Photos: Dalek & Delta Exhibit

Photos: Dalek & Delta Exhibit
Friday August 28, 2009

Dalek & Delta, the two-man show from Dalek (Juxtapoz cover #87) and Delta just opened London's Elms Lesters Painting Rooms and the new work confirms what we have known all along: these two artists know how to kill it. See photos from the opening now.

This exhibition brings together two international painters of magnitude. James Marshall, aka Dalek, who currently lives in South Carolina, and Amsterdam-based Boris Tellegen, aka Delta, are both masters of their handling of color and texture. Marshall, who spent a year as an assistant to Takashi Murakami, has developed and honed a technique of meticulously applying flat blocks of color, whilst playing with shapes and exaggerated optical perspectives.

"Two changes in technique have recently allowed Dalek to ratchet the spatial complexity up a notch. In linear terms, there’s an increased overlapping between forms whilst, in color terms, subverting the light-to-dark or conversely dark-to-light build-up of tonal depth by interjecting chop-change color values at will across the picture plane to break up conventional recession," said Ben Jones, art historian.

Conversely, Tellegen is constantly experimenting with his complex 'architectural' paintings, collages and 3D sculptural wall pieces, discovering, through his use of color and references to urban decay, how to play with perspectives through the build up of textures and shadows.

"There’s an openness in Delta’s practice to organic breakdown which might at first seem antithetical to the precision of his work’s apparently precise graphic underpinning. Thinking back to one of his street pieces, with the moss proliferating and gradually covering the relief, helps point up in a rare natural example a key conceptual theme for Delta throughout: the organic system and its threat to subsume the man-made," said Ben Jones, art historian.

Elms Lesters Painting Rooms