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Dalek and Delta at Elms Lesters, Aug 28-Sep 26

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DELTA Controlrods High

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More info after the jump.

Dalek and Delta’s exhibition brings together two artists whose majestic use of colour and geometrical and architectural references have written a new chapter in street art’s history. “Inspiration is everywhere in the sense of the way colours and shapes work…” James Marshall Elms Lesters Painting Rooms is proud to announce an exhibition of new works by American painter James Marshall, aka DALEK, and Dutch artist Boris Tellegen, aka DELTA, both masters of the art of handling colour and texture, and
both at pivotal points in their careers.

Growing up between Chicago, Japan and New York, James Marshall, after having spent a year as an assistant to
Takashi Murakami, has developed and honed a technique of meticulously applying flat blocks of colour, whilst
playing with exaggerated shapes and baffling optical perspectives.

His background as a street artist left a decisive mark on his approach to painting, and his most recent compositions
challenge the idea of space and perspective, sucking the viewer’s eyes in a vortex of hallucinatory topographies.
Pushing the limit of making any logical sense, the images are at the same time communicating a sense of tidiness
and control.

The art historian Ben Jones says: 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 colour terms,
subverting the light-to-dark or conversely dark-to-light build-up of tonal depth by interjecting chop-change colour
values at will across the picture plane to break up conventional recession ”

Pioneer of the graffiti movement, Boris Tellegen, aka DELTA is constantly experimenting with complex architectural
paintings, collages and 3D sculptural wall pieces, discovering, through the use of colour and references to urban
decay, how to play with perspectives by using the build up of textures and shadows.
His work is reminiscent of the old Utopists and Constructivists and is a portrait of industrial architecture and urban
detritus.
Boris Tellegen organically breaks down the composition, his work resulting in an openness which at first seems
antithetical to the precision of the graphic underpin used, subverting the reassuring geometrical system to create
surgically precise and unrealistic new shapes and 3D objects.

“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.” Ben Jones

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