News

The Fondation is currently closed. It will reopen on October 9th for the "Gustave Fayet, Collector - Designer. Icons of Modern Art" exhibition".

Wild Wind Roaming (Night)

  • 2022
  • Megan Rooney
  • Acrylic, oil, pastel, and oil stick on canvas
  • 199,6 x 152,3 x 3,5 cm

Colour, which Rooney describes as possessing “a will of its own”, plays a structuring and narrative role here. The word “Night” in the title points to a palette of deep, sombre tones, interspersed with contrasting flashes of light that create an atmosphere of nocturnal suspense — fuelled by the view of the London city skyline from his studio.

Placed at the very end of the creative process as a poetic fragment, the title evokes breath, movement and nocturnal wandering rather than describing them. Memory, perception and transformation remain the guiding threads of the work, which, like Rooney’s entire practice, aims to evoke a sense of the world rather than to represent it.

“Wild Wind Roaming (Night)” is the oldest painting in the family of works featured in the exhibition ‘Flyer and the Seed’ (exhibited at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris Marais, 2023). I regard this work as the matriarch of the family group. I began the painting in late summer 2022, when the light in my studio hung in the form of halos, creating bursts of colour that appeared and disappeared, casting shadows and forming shapes that I followed and pursued. This painting underwent countless transformations before the final image took shape.”
Megan Rooney (in QA)

Crédit artiste : © Megan Rooney, 2023 Crédit photographique : © Primae / Louis Bourjac

Megan Rooney

Born in South Africa, Megan Rooney spent part of her childhood in Brazil before moving to Canada, and then settled in London, England, where she has lived since 2014. In her works, she sets the paint in motion, both on canvases and on walls. Regardless of the medium or format, the act of painting is a physical, almost performative endeavour, which culminates in her monumental paintings.

In 2022, Megan Rooney took over a room at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, blending painting, architecture and performance during the exhibition La Couleur en fugue to create a non-figurative pictorial landscape that nevertheless remains rooted in an evocation of reality. Using a variety of tools, the artist painted directly onto the walls, creating an immersive space of vibrant colours that responded to the body’s movements in harmony with the venue. Atmospheric and geological in nature, her works are the result of a lengthy process involving various media (oil, acrylic, pastel). The artist revisits her fluid or denser colours—whether in acrylic or oil—using pastels to draw lines and transform her painting. Megan Rooney explores the richness of a vibrant, colourful palette, whose shades blend into harmonious or dissonant combinations. In her works, one can even discern allusions to real spaces or to nature.

Read more