We do not know what is hidden in the murky lake that lies below the dying twilight. Perhaps the lake’s mellow stillness, seemingly untouched by human presence and yet representative of it by it’s deeply melancholic interpretation, wallows a mysterious secret, or perhaps, the sheer expanse of water drifting lugubriously towards us from a broken horizon of hazy trees is an indication of an impending drama. What will the day reveal in these somnolent paintings? Somehow one is led to believe that there will never be day or night but only the pure silence of a still world enveloped in everlasting twilight.

In these painting, where twilight has evened colour to one shade of dark green, one is reminded of Whistler’s nocturne paintings or by Rothko’s late, mournfully luminous Seagram murals at the Tate. Certainly there is the same feeling of envelopment in Rocher’s waterscapes as there is in Rothko’s late paintings, but rather than being immured in a quietly threatening biomorphic mass we are contained in a representational image that has with in it a melancholic sensation of emptiness.

Human curiosity draws one naturally into a world of symbols and myth but it is the strength of these paintings that Rocher’s landscapes do not reveal their secret but leave us to contemplate their meaning without the need for metaphysical interpretations. In this sense one is reminded of certain Chinese landscapes where colour and form have been reduced by distance and mood to pure atmosphere. There is also another similarity with Chinese painting here and that is in the Zen like, minimal simplicity of the paintings; one coat of paint dabbed and manipulated and a layer of mastic to denote the line of trees on the horizon is all that is required to conjure the image and sensation of these landscapes.

Danny Moynihan feb 2005