Tumult in the clouds

'Tumult in the clouds' 1985 is from a significant body of work Rooney produced in the mid-1980s drawing upon the war-time imagery of his childhood, quoted from secondary sources. These works conflate the popularisation of violence which occured during the Second World War with post-modern considerations of spectacle, artifice and mediation, while maintaining a connection to Rooney's earlier practice in abstraction.

Although he was only eight when the war ended, Rooney has recalled how the memory of wartime remained with him vividly as an adult, in particular the way 'war seemed to occupy one's life completely - including things like Australian animals in comic strips fighting the Japs and Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny sending up Hitler'.

The works in Rooney's 1985 solo show 'One Complete Abstract Painting Included in Every Picture' addressed this entanglement of violence and popular culture, politics and capitalism. A number of the canvases were visually linked by the use of camoflauge patterning - an effect Andy Warhol began to make use of the following year.

In 'Tumult in the clouds', the camouflage effect is somewhat distorted, with the swirling sections of orange, grey and black also invoking flames and smoke, as well as military maps and charts - as Philip Brophy has noted. Layered within this colourful 'explosion' is a spiralling warplane alongside which two scantily-clad female figures appear almost humorously like illustrations of fashion mannequins.

Cool and cartoon-like in style, the work reflects Rooney's experience of wartime mediated and sanitised through popular culture, bringing this into dialogue with the 'evacuation of the real' that informed postmodern image-making of the period.