Can a painting ever hope to capture such indefinable, nebulous qualities as silence and light? Can it step outside the boundaries of its physical and visual existence to represent the aural and invisible, giving shape to the sound of silence and form to light? This is the question that absorbs Duncan Bullen, … Like an alchemist, Bullen struggles to transform a base metal into precious gold, changing the coloured earth of his pigments into something luminous; its material physicality into something light and weightless. His alchemical tools the simple grammar of painting: colour, line, pattern, symmetry and shape… Artists have long sought to represent the elusive, transient effects of light, but Bullen doesn’t just want to represent it, he has set himself the task of recreating it, painting images that are themselves generators of silence and light. He tackles the problem like a chemist bringing together unstable compounds, gently positioning a semi-circle of deep blue next to another of lighter blue, or a half quatrefoil of deep purple- blue next to one of orange-red. As they come into contact with each other they seem to release a burst of energy, a zip or halo of light that radiates out to the viewer…When so much of the contemporary art world declares its allegiance to the illusory glitter of shallow surfaces; when it celebrates shock and ridicules the Universal, Bullen travels a different path. His jewel-like paintings are a quiet affirmation of all those things that are currently seen to be unfashionable; a manifesto for beauty, truth, and God. They are beacons of light and silence in a world of darkness and constant noise.

Rev’d Dr. Richard Davey

Silence and Light, Otter Gallery, Chichester