When we went out in search of an interview or story on James Roper, the pickings were slim. But that’s should not be an indication of his time on the scene, or his popularity. So rather than focus on external perspectives of his work, we’re reverting to select passages from a statement available on Roper’s website. “The construction of each painting fuses disparate images from a variety of sources such as fashion magazines, animation stills, comics, the Internet as well as my own photo’s and drawings. I predominantly choose images and try to create forms which I feel register a visual ‘peak shift’, a term given to the phenomena of ‘neurological attraction’ that appears in both humans and animals to an extreme characterisation of an object. Peak shift has been suggested by the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran as one of the ’10 universal laws of art’.”
It get’s deeper. “As Ballard described in such novels as ‘Crash’ and ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, I have similarly explored this theme through the structure and landscape of the body, how our bodies move through our environment and their physical relationship to architectural forms as well as the immediate folds in the fabric of our clothes. Also the fetishism of inanimate objects and the fusion of body and object or self and other which is apparent within many religious practices especially in Eastern Philosophy. This inter-connection between the internal and external can also be seen in Deleuze’s concept of the fold: “The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.” (Deleuze – Foucault)”
