Within and Without is a solo exhibition of new paintings made between the early spring of 2021 and spring 2022. This body of work signalled not only a return to the studio after lockdown but my first UK solo show for 10 years. Shown at GBS Fine Art’s newly opened gallery space in Somerset, the paintings draw upon fictional, remembered and imagined landscapes and explore the recurring themes in my work of solace, refuge and escape.

Within and Without

Catalogue Essay by Giles Baker-Smith

Gill Rocca’s Within and Without is significant for a number of reasons. 2022 marks 25 years since I first worked with Gill – she, and another young painter, had an exhibition at the Blue Gallery in Walton Street in Chelsea – and it also marks 10 years since Gill’s last solo show in the UK. However, while important in terms of place and the numbers, the real significance of this exhibition should be seen to be where it has brought Gill’s development as an artist and painter.

That early show in 1997, just a year after she had completed her MA, included a series of small, largely monochromatic abstract paintings of grid formations. They were intense, dense works on paper mounted onto stretched canvas, the bars of the grid layered one on top of the other, suggestive of those mirror reflections that stretch away to infinity. While undoubtedly claustrophobic, at the same time they were strangely alluring, enticing the viewer to enter this fictitious, rather alarming space within the picture plane. The reason for this analysis of her early work is simple; the form and methodology may have developed considerably in the intervening years, but Rocca is still largely doing the same thing, that is to say, she transports the viewer into an unknown, intangible but somehow recognizable space, its essential elements rooted in a sort of metaphysical topography.

As they have for a while now, her landscapes largely eschew the specifics of place, just as all human presence remains largely absent. Some 15 years ago, the imagery was often drawn from her immediate surroundings in south London – the more formal topography of an urban park; later they were increasingly influenced by travels in the US, Australia, Scandinavia and Japan. A cabin set deep in woods outside the capital offers fertile material as well as an escape from the city. That said, more recently, the inspiration is perhaps derived more from subconscious memory – her Lancashire upbringing, childhood walks and early road trips.

We all have those connections to a place or places, be it from our childhood, a particular journey or even from a film, a painting, a photograph or envisaged from a book; Rocca is, in a sense, subliminally realising those places for us, stirring the recollections. Moreover, memory of place is largely indivisible from the process: There’s an escape involved in the practice of painting and I think the most successful pieces are when I get lost in the process, stop thinking and explore… There’s a feel to the place I’m trying to reach, sometimes I can connect this to the memory of a particular place, but often this occurs to me after the painting is finished… On the best days a painting becomes a sort of meditative space where the landscape takes shape in an intuitive way. 

One of the most distinctive characteristics of Rocca’s practice is her use of birch ply tondos or roundels in her ongoing Figment series. While the philosophical and aesthetic properties of a circle are well established, for Rocca the form accentuates the liminal space between her intentions and what subconsciously emerges during the process of painting. The tondos – and indeed all the paintings – are meticulously layered with thin coats of gesso and sanded back prior to the application of multiple layers of thin oil glazes that slowly and gradually build up the image. For many years, she has deliberately restricted her palette to just 5 colours, including white; all the forms, all the luminosity, dusk, dawn, the trees, headlights, street lamps rendered with extraordinary dexterity from 5 key pigments. 

The apotheosis of this approach is the remarkable series of Nocturnes (2022). Almost – but not quite – monochromatic, these seven square panels seem to echo Uccello’s seminal The Hunt in the Forest (circa 1465-70) with all the protagonists summarily removed. It is a bravura piece of painting, eliciting on the one hand those innate subconscious fears of being alone at dusk in the midst of a forest, all birdsong absent, while at the same time celebrating the transient, fragile beauty of a woodland environment in muted tones of grey. For me, it also curiously takes me back all those years to the original grid paintings; almost full circle in fact… So some 25 years on, the work in this exhibition is the fullest expression of what Rocca has been striving for to date and we are proud and grateful to host it.

GBS March 2022