'138 Boom Boom Room', 2006
Mixed Media on Hardboard, Plywood and Polymethyl Methacrylate
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'132', 2005
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Lee Broughall is a young painter based in Surrey, and a 2006 graduate of the University of East London. His most recently completed series of four large-scale works employ the repeated motif of a misshapen disc floating on either a red or black backdrop. The discs contain blotches and other impurities that are reminiscent of the swirls and patterns of a planet's surface, like the famous Great Red Spot on Jupiter, and the planetary allusion is especially clear in 'Flag', where a three-dimensional Union Jack has been appended to the fiery red surface of the disc, rudely jutting out into the privileged space of the viewer. These are arresting and intelligent paintings.
In three of the works, the disc sits at the bottom, or towards the bottom of the canvas, where it appears to float heavily, and 'Work no. 132' appears particularly ominous: a white blood cell in a sea of red. There is a violence to the handling of the paint throughout these works, which comes in fits, stabs and splashes, and this aspect is enhanced in two of the works by the addition of three-dimensional lettering, reading 'Burns' and 'Boom Boom Room', the latter apparently a piece of club signage or perhaps part of a jukebox. The disc in 'Boom Boom Room' is a sickly pale green, like a monstrous growth, and evinces
most clearly Broughall's own brand of painterly abjection.
Iconography aside, Broughall is attuned to other issues in current painting, and places a special emphasis on formal repetition, the notion of the series and, most importantly of all, the process of painting itself, which he finds to be a pressing concern in the work of other influential British painters like Callum Innes. He states: 'For me, the inspiration comes mostly from the act of painting.'
To see more of Lee Broughall's work registered on Saatchi Online click here.
Bill Roberts
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Bill Roberts is a writer based in London, and a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
