Alice Diamond Rankle & Reynolds Kritika Magazine

Artist duo Rankle and Reynolds work in collaboration to create expressive contemporary landscape
pieces. Alan Rankle is the painter, and Kirsten Reynolds is the audio visual artist. They utilise their
respective medium to work in an unexpectedly cohesive manner, with their pieces showing how they
bounce off one another’s work to create something altogether new. Reynolds uses light painting in
response to Rankles traditional paintings, as can be seen in their series ‘On the Edge of Wrong’ 2010 at
Federico Rui Gallery, Milan.

These works display expressive, gestural, and impressionistic movement and colour, paying homage to
the old ways of painting whilst maintaining a contemporary stance. the way that the ‘image comes to
life’ reminds me of the sublime (a topic that has taken my interest since first studying it last year) and
reminds me of ‘the terrifying’ in particular. The idea of ‘the terrifying’ comes from Kant’s definition of
the Sublime – that there are three main categories (the splendid, the noble, and the terrifying).
A typical example of the terrifying sublime would be ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’ 1851-3 by John
Martin. This hellish scene depicts what I would describe as an intimidatingly vast and satanic valley,
with a clear religious narrative towards judgement day or another possible reason for such ‘wrath’.
However, the reason I lean towards categorising Rankle and Reynold’s work in the same as the John
Martin piece is not for hell-like imagery and typical terror, but for the obscuring of the landscape, and
the exaggerated colours in combination with the light painting alluding to the technological
advancement of society – which then links to my fear of the Anthropocene’s takeover of the landscape
we must work to maintain as an eco-friendly space.

The main thing I find of interest about these two artists is the union between traditional methods of
painting, and technological methods of art using light. It reminds me of Turners nickname ‘The Painter
of Light’, in as much that Reynolds uses long exposure to effectively paint with light in collaboration
with Rankle’s expressive oil paintings.In my own work, I have been experimenting with projecting
images in a film over the top of more traditional and expressive acrylic paintings to create a layered
narrative of time and the evolution of the landscape in response to the Capitalocene.

Alice Diamond