James Roper

by James Roper: 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'.

This peakshift is present within advertising, Hollywood blockbusters and Haute couture fashion as well as in
the extreme forms of body exaggeration found in bodybuilding and pornography. Japanese animation, which
also uses this technique, has for some time informed my painting style and is where I appropriated images
exclusively for my 'Hypermass' series. By isolating out what I see as the crucial parts of such images and
collaging them together into the work my intention is to intensify these visual triggers even further so they
form a sort of neurological hyperactivity.