1970s
In California, Denny’s painting again changed radically. In the late 1970s, the acrylic ‘Moonshine’ drawings had incorporated scratch marks, leading eventually to a series of large monochrome paintings where a concentrated cluster of scratching rests, with shockingly disruptive impact, on a thin horizontal: a datum line, never a ‘horizon’. Though they disturb expectation, these are among Denny’s most beautiful works. Their acrylic surfaces are delicate and subtly modulated, constructed from up to 30 layers of pigment applied until it is intensely rich, absorbing the eye and the attention. Few painters can fill a near-monochrome canvas with so much import. The central image may be a small tight parcel of coloured paper, like a spell or a ‘secret’, or an urgent concentration of colour posed on the canvas as an attention-demanding event. Most recently these centres - of meaning, activity and reciprocity between painting and viewer – have become three-dimensional. If their meanings are largely irretrievable they are nonetheless dramatic and disquieting, thrusting their presence forward.
Since the early 1960s colour and form have been inseparable in Denny’s work; they have remained controlled, resolved and resolutely abstract. Yet they are redolent of human experience and of light and space; their titles contain innumerable – if incidental - references to popular culture. Denny’s comment on Charles Biederman is true also of himself: he is one of the ‘most remarkable, and sustainedly radical artists of our time’.
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