There is a certain exquisite presumption to the act of deleting significant chunks of a busy cityscape—carving for example, empty, truly empty, space into Times Square—as Richard Galpin does in recent works Automaton and Dazzle Camouflage, part of his debut New York solo show at Roebling Hall.
There is a similar maniacal quality to the act of building negative elements into a rollercoaster -revealing not the swooping gestures, the hair-raising hills and peaks one associates with such a ride, but rather its structural essence: the cross sections of the tracks, vertical patterns in the scaffolding.
This is an artist who cares more about the vertebrae of the ballerina's spine than the divine execution of her pirouette. Galpin's large format colour photographs of busy cities and rollercoasters are subjected to a surgical 'peeling' away: the scraping off of the top layer of a picture with a scalpel, leaving graphic fragments, patterns, revealed repetitions and dynamics, reconceived in relation to the blank, slightly bruised fibres of the white page beneath. The effect is something like a reverse collage.
