Sam Dargan

The March of the Abysmal - 2006

Sam Dargan is an artist I became familiar with at Rokeby Gallery in London. His paintings first struck me as simple and delicate and sometimes really funny despite their, 'we're gonna die
anyway' mood. A Bad Year for People and his last exhibition, Burth of a Nayshun create an entire vocabulary of the apathetic and the failed within contemporary reality. In his paintings, failure is wallowed in, and used as an equalizer from which no one is free. The failures within daily existence are commonplace, unimpressive and unavoidable. He's also published a really great graphic novel called The Neverlutionary.

Heroes and Villains of Future Generic Socialist Republic: Local Branch, 4 - 2008

The world Dargan depicts is filtered through a lens of disappointment, its defeat has been painstakingly stitched into it. This is a land fractured by the sneering contempt of the pub cynic, the mournful ruminations of the old soldier and the more than my jobsworth attitude of the bloke at work. The psychology of disillusionment forms a complex circuitry throughout Dargan’s oeuvre; the idea of being resigned to a life half lived and the striving to achieve a ‘dream’ that leads only to boredom, becomes a recurring motif. But this work does not represent a retreat from political engagement, more it is a subjective mapping, an attempt to seek out a new space. Dargan assumes the role of working class intellectual plundering the history books in the municipal library, nostalgia in his hands becomes a weapon of revenge. These paintings are pathological, angry, and resentful. Yes we want something else the forlorn subjects seem to be saying, but where lies the alternative?

Taken from text by artist and writer Laura Oldfield Ford.