John Hurrell – 12 September, 2025

A perfectly spherical white ‘poached egg’ (or bowler hat) sits demurely on the gallery floor. It is a Rocket Lab engine patent drawing as virtual space colony 2 (US2012 /0234.19A! VISCOUS LIQUIDMONO PROPELLANT, 2012) 2023, Simon Denny’s replication of a futuristic flying-saucer come igloo that is a planned spaceage enclosed city. With its inverted ring of paddle-like projecting numbers that speculatively hint (my guess) at the total number of days remaining for life to exist on earth, it beckons to us as we enter the Lett space, and pass between Lett’s walls also presenting Denny’s ersatz ‘Italian Futurist’, blue, grey and brown fired-rocket paintings, satelites and ‘posters’ where A1 has been used to stress art historical references.

The mechanically-daubed canvases mimic angled ‘pointillist’ brushstrokes, their small clusters collectively depicting ascending missiles. These images allude to defense systems and spaceage colonisation. They are constructed by programmed computers that seem to emphasise successive layers of time, for the plotted gouache and inkjet have been applied sequentially. Overtly so. They also exude a casual Warholesque looseness in their compositional structure, so as to imply an anti-deterministic stance—a whiff of spontaneous improvisation.

As hinted, some nod to the second generation of Italian Futurist painters, where we find Futurism filtered through an awareness of space age rocket technology. Thus the works allude to Fascism, militarism and perhaps today, with Denny, the popularity of ethically dubious politicians like Trump. Most feature stacked horizontal bands, tilted diamond-based grids and hand or machine-applied dragged and smeared paint and ink: rendered satellite technology that blends angular grids with blue and brown palettes.

Looking at them is a little like peeking through Venetian blinds that allow slivers of light to slide through the irregular divisions. Some are made manually, but the computer-based images are more dense spatially than the related (less complicated) computer images by Simon Ingram of a few years back, that have more exposed canvas and deliberately less colour-range—and Denny perhaps speaks to McCahon’s Titirangi paintings of the mid-fifties.

These beguiling (but alarmingly grim) grey and blue, thrusting missile paintings are deliberately presented as multilayered, choppily fragmented or ambiguous statements (far beyond Cape Canaveral news photos) so that a fierce critique of masculine aggression that is behind global violence is readily apparent.

As sensual but mostly ‘anti-manual’ works they present an impressive, highly tactile, slanted machine-painted surface and cognisance of art history, world history and human stupidity. They are lusciously beautiful but programmed—and although terrifically interesting, they are also perhaps clearly ominous. We seem to have run out of time. Tomorrow has evaporated. An empty impossible delusion of survival persists.

John Hurrell

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