The ROTARY PAINTINGS form a significant body of work which Capper has been developing since working in isolation in his studio during the first national lockdown. Engaging with the artist's experiments in mark-making and hydraulic sculpture, the ROTARY PAINTINGS are created using the HYDRA PAINTER - a hydraulic painting machine. The first iteration of HYDRA PAINTER, built in 2015, is a basic machine consisting of a small square table with a hole in the middle to allow the spindle of a hydraulic motor through it, attached to which is a beam with paint rollers affixed to it. Despite initial successful tests, HYDRA PAINTER was packed away and sat in storage until Capper rediscovered the machine in March 2020, when the idea to make the ROTARY PAINTINGS was born from the repetitiveness of daily routine and the blurring of indefinite days under lockdown.

Capper’s new HYDRA PAINTER (2021) is a bigger machine. It handles more paint and advances the ROTARY PAINTINGS through scale, allowing for greater experimentation using a more expansive spectrum of colours. The paintings are created using the same colours of industrial paint that Capper uses to powder coat his sculptures, directly linking the ROTARY PAINTINGS to his wider practice. With the HYDRA PAINTER performing the manual movement of the artist’s hands, the mind is free to fixate on the fusing and blurring of colours, giving time to the artist to decide which paint to reach for next. Each painting stands as a record of the day on which it was made. The dissonance between the perfectly circular and formal format and the paintings' titles, drawn from media headlines and government briefings, seems absurd and humorous. VACCINE PASSPORT, 2021 and IT'S PRETTY OBVIOUS YOU KNOW, THE CROCUS OF HOPE IS POKING THROUGH THE FROST AND SPRING IS ON IT'S WAY, 2021 encapsulate this.

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In my opinion the formal circular image expresses life, time and strength in organic structure. The paintings capture the mechanical origins of movement in my sculpture although keep the nature of speed and time static in their creation, like cellular structures caught in colour images from the digital microscope. These works have a friendly formal presence in a domestic setting, yet they deal with a time that changed the world. Compared to my sculptural divisions that speculate and ask only for time to be accepted as contemporary sculpture...

- James Capper