Prenelle - Sam Dargan

The Unspeakables
An exhibition of new work by Sam Dargan
September 9th – October 15th 2004 (Private View Thurs 9th Sep 6:00-9:30pm)

Press Release

In Sam Dargan’s paintings alienated white collar workers are thrust into stressful and potentially hopeless situations. The characters are malcontents; emotionally inarticulate men, able only to share their discomfort and linked only by their common isolation. Battling against the forces of Nature, like the imagined heroic fantasies of office bound workers, the figures are somehow forlorn, the depicted adventures fragmentary, futile and incomplete, echoes of the final scenes of movies the end of which you have only just caught. These are images of figures engulfed by (non) events, by the pettiness of their desires and the anonymous smallness of their heroism. The landscape settings decontextualise their plight. The literary and cinematic references (‘The Third Man’, ‘The Man Between’, ‘The Trial’, ‘American Tabloid’) suggest the idea of the loner and outsider, fighting impossible odds, but filtered through the 9 to 5 existence of a middle income, middle management worker. The overall effect is of dark, hysterical and ambiguous humour and a kind of existential archetypalism.

Sam Dargan trained at the Royal College of Art and gained an MA in painting in 2002. Recent exhibitions include ‘Esoterica’ - IBID Projects, ‘Now Is Good (ne travaillez jamais)’ - Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, ‘Custodian’ – Barbican, ‘Snow’ - Transition Gallery, ‘A Tiny New Nation’ – BowieArt.