paul newcombe: opus
PAUL NEWCOMBE
09.04.24 - 11.05.24
paul newcombe: opus
The Melbourne painter Paul Newcombe has conceived a new exhibition for Block Projects in Hawthorn. Newcombe’s Opus is a group of paintings centred on visuality and a sensuous grasp of colour. It is not colour that screams brightness or speaks its surface but is the experience of something seen and fashioned into linear form.
This large opus of paintings is presented as a complete work. The paintings are all square and are in four sizes. Newcombe likes a system, and the circle and the square are his mantra and the necessary means of production. System painting suggests repetition but what is evident in Newcombe’s painting is a willingness to admit the like-for-like form of his paintings in favour of differences that are to be found in colour.
There is an analogy here which has a voice in this series. A single colour can have the like-value of an individual. Individuals are both singular and part of a group. It is what the artist Josef Albers described as ‘independence and interdependence,’ a polarity that speaks of relationships – in harmony or discord - that arise when individuals or colours are grouped together.
What further unifies the paintings of Opus are the colour bands of the compositions. They are multitudinous in hue: green – Phthalo and moss, pale blue to lighter grey, and into red, brick and brown. The certainty is here, and with it, the controlled application of synthetic polymer paint. On balance, Newcombe’s palette does not appear particularly Australian nor is it the colour of post-war American abstraction, but looks English, and would suggest painters of the 50s such as Terry Frost and Adrian Heath.
Abstract painting is tasked with remaining visible in a world that is ever more complex. We may think abstractly but we see things in figurative terms. The challenge for a painter such as Paul Newcombe and this series of paintings is to convert the moving world into abstract form. But more critically, it is the allusion, the keeping alive of lived experience, that the paintings of Opus so successfully sustain.
Brett Ballard
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dorcas tinamayi bennett: mother’s story
Dorcas Tinamayi Bennett
12.03.24 - 06.04.24
Dorcas Tinamayi Biography:
“I was born in the bush at Wurturu rock hole near Kaltukatjarra (Docker River)”. After her birth, her mother and father walked with her to Warburton Mission where she was given her English name by the missionary Mr. Will Wade.
Her parents returned, walking with Dorcas to the Warakurna - Tjukurla area. Although soon after they had to leave due to the radiation exposure from the atomic testing in Maralinga “the funny smell made a lot of people sick”. Her family met Mr. Bob McAuley and traveled with him in the renowned yellow Native Patrol Officer’s truck to the Amata settlement. They then travelled by camel to Areyonga where Dorcas began to attend school.
Dorcas and her family returned to the Warakurna homeland when it was established in the mid-1970s. “In 2005 we started painting on paper then on canvas, the old shop turned into an art centre, that’s where we all started doing painting” Dorcas is the current Chairperson for Warakurna Artists. Dorcas Bennett is the daughter of Nyurupayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett) a senior artist for Papunya Tula Artists. Dorcas’s paintings are prefigured by her mother’s Tjukurrpa (dream time), encompassing the country between Tjukurla and Warakurna.
As the final heir to these ancestral stories, it is crucial for Dorcas to reenergizes them. She does so with a lot of gusto, creating vibrant connections between the dotted Tali (sand hills), the circler Kapi Warnanpa (water holes), and various designs linked to the journey of a group of women to the rockhole site of Yumarra.
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JAMES CLAYDEN : THOUGHT / MEMORY PAINTINGS
James Clayden
30.01.23 - 02.03.24
Jame clayden: artist statement
Early in 2023 after rewatching Peter Weir’s fantastic film The Last Wave I found myself once again disappointed with the way the film ended and thought to try and paint an ending for myself. The thought kept going around in my head and began merging with the memory of being in the Lisbon Aqueducts that were built on ancient Roman structures during the 18th century; this seemed together with the feeling left by the ending of the film, of being underground beneath the city but at the same time in some deep space far beyond, where past and present pulsed like some atavistic memory of longing amidst water and sky like spheres as one. Out of this, I remembered Michael Snow’s haunting 1967 short experimental film Wavelength and after watching it again it seemed something worthwhile was going on around me, without me, and this together with the mystery of painting itself is more or less how and why I began work on this series of Thought/Memory Paintings.
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steven asquith: analogue pictures
Steven Asquith
21.12.23 - 27.01.24
Steven Asquith / analogue pictures
As a sequence of hieroglyphs that line the gallery walls, Steven Asquith’s new series of works on paper, Analogue Pictures, represent abstract narratives that attempt to unravel the current global diaspora and the circumstances and events affecting us all today. But unlike the ancient hieroglyphs that depict a literal representation of events or stories, the imagery in Asquith’s works forms an abstract language and gestures to our inner response to the events of today and our recent past.
Analogue Pictures continue Asquith’s exploration of abstract narratives that engage with psychological states derived from contemporary narratives. The layered and intricate works are fine representations of Asquith’s concern with the multi-layered meanings that images encompass. A point of departure in this enquiry is the numerous definitions of the term analogue in the exhibition's title.
Analogue can signify the information or signals represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position; a contrast to the digital and technology; signify a person or thing seen as comparable to another; a clock or watch showing the time by means of hands or a pointer rather than displayed digits; analogue sound machines; repetitive patterns. In Chemistry, an analogue is a compound with a molecular structure similar to another. We can consider an analogue to be something similar or comparable to something else, in general, or in some specific detail—something analogous to something else. These varied connotations suggest a polysemous lens with which we should approach these works.
At first glance, the series of 20 works on paper seem identical. However, upon closer examination, we notice the restrained variances in each. Take for instance, the watercolour underlay in each work. Each portrays contemporary skyscapes affected by smog or cloud formations at urgent times of the day. Here Asquith alludes to the traditions of the landscape, although these are rendered with an allusion to the real threat of global warming and climate change. The epoch of these works is contemporised in reference to the most significant issue affecting humanity's future: our reliance on fossil fuel economies and that our dependency needs to be addressed. Fast. And although this observation is apparent, it is only one of the many implications of the work.
Next, we look to decipher the other abstract icons in the works. Familiar abstract tropes and shapes —squares, triangles and circles—reveal diverging patterns across the surface of the works. How they are composed and repeated allows us to grasp the differences.
Abstractions resonant of eyeballs appear to rush across the surface of the works at speed and in patterns, each more abstract than the last. Vertical and horizontal compositions emerge. At times circling out from the centre of the image, appearing as a sacred space meditation mandala. However, these meditations are present as a spiritual reconning of our age, influenced by the tension and turmoil of our post-pandemic consciousness. Here Asquith also uses these icons as metaphors for perception, with varied patterns suggesting differing interpretations of current events and outcomes.
The infinity centre of each work infers that the epicentres are collapsing in on themselves, perhaps as a portal to another dimension or a star collapsing in on itself at the end of its life. This presented phenomenon forms a central focus of the picture plane, directing the viewer's gaze and imagination to the possibilities contained within the images.
Within the bounds of the wavering compositions, the viewer’s gaze continually returns to the eyeball at the centre of each image. Functioning as an axis, it guides the viewer to the midpoint of the image and engages them directly – always staring back. A centripetal counterpoint to the unease and disarray of the darting eyes surrounding it. The eyeballs evoke different patterns for how we respond to our environment and perceive threats of our time.
We then look to the menacing dark triangle formations that sit as guardians on either side of the collapsing infinity centre of the work. Ominous and with sharp edges, they lurk and threaten to slice the eyeballs as their patterns emerge across the picture plane. One thinks of the surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 French surrealist film directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, in reference to the inferred horror and present danger these sharp-edged triangles appear to present. When Buñuel is about to slice the young woman's eyeball with a razor, she stares straight ahead as he brings the razor to her eye. The scene then cuts to an image of a cloud passing before the moon. In Asquith’s images, these menacing triangles hover and threaten to glide and sliver the eyeballs across each image at any moment.
The only variances within the repetitive compositions are the patterns of eyeballs and skyscapes that change and differ in their symbolic relationship with one another. The tropes are presented with the direction for the viewer to decipher and derive meaning from the abstract narrative. As if these works say everything and nothing simultaneously—the viewer is asked to interpret these messages and feel the response as they are present in front of the works.
Each work represents our collective physiological response to the events of our recent past—the inner world of our being. The abstract narratives portray internal responses to external incidents—lockdowns, #BLM, economic instability, destabilisation of the Asia Pacific region, the digital, our imminent environmental collapse, fossil fuels, [insert your own inescapable disaster here].
Within the convolutions of the narratives within these works, Asquith presents a dichotomy between the washed watercolour backgrounds and the sharply rendered abstractions that float above like architectural drawings for concepts yet to be fully grasped. The crisp line work contrasts the soft painterly qualities of the backgrounds, yet somehow, they are co-dependent to balance and resolve the works. Two languages and techniques are at play here, each desperate to find a voice, yet each is utterly meaningless without the other.
By Dr Aneta Trajkoski, University of Melbourne
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KYLE JENKINS: CELARE PAINTINGS
Kyle Jenkins
10.05.23 - 17.06.23
KYLE JENKINS / CELARE paintings
The monochrome was first created in the late 19th Century by Paul Bilhaud and his work Combat de Nègres pendant la nuit ("Battle of negroes during the night") 1882, however historically its establishment as a painting strategy is in early 20th century Modernism with Kasimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ 1915. This marked a point of departure in painting that has been readdressed by numerous artists, movements, and groups since 1950s, such as European abstraction, Swiss Concrete, and New York Neo-Geo. Historically a monochrome can suggest the removal not the application of paint because there is no identifiable representational image in the work. This is incorrect because these forms of work are not reductive as they aren’t about taking something away, it is about maximising and focusing on what’s there.
For myself, what the monochrome (and my work) investigates are active tropes associated with the very act of painting in both historical and contemporary contexts. Instead of figuration and recognisable images (representing objects/scenes/feelings in art), this work is about non-figurative propositions that engage with history, the marketplace, and the way in which a painting is received in the early 21st century. The word Celare(the title of these paintings) means to colour, to cover, conceal, destroy, and hide. This series of misshapen monochrome works deal with issues of originality (appropriation), authorship, presentation, display, and the act ‘of painting’ where the actual picture in the painting is the painting itself. Additionally, by creating a monochrome, one is engaging with the history of such painting but also the problems every person is dealing with when making a painting, that of the problems of colour, shape, composition, weight, tonal value, scale, flatness, the frame of support. Instead of adding and adding, these aesthetic issues are just all collapsed into one colour, one surface, one composition, one construction, as one painting, that is about questioning what painting is, and could be. The monochrome works are about encoding each painting with the very nature of what painting is re: production, perception, reception, and interpretation. In this way what you bring to the work is what you get from the work because the paintings aren’t about creating illusion based within the technological or representational screen but is about looking back at the viewer offering a sense of reconciled finality through colour relationships and formal limitations.
The CELARE monochromatic paintings are about engaging with the tradition that the reading of a painting is all about its surface; as such, this series of shaped-based canvases can seem to mimic architectural motifs, but also exist in a space between painting and object, creating a tension that asks, “is it a painting, is it an object or ultimately what is it as an artwork?” One of the ways this is done is by creating paintings where the edges are imperfect, with a hand-made DIY aesthetic. The sides of the canvas are painted so the work acts as a surface of intention indicating that the function is tied to its tradition, but the artwork also becomes a painting ‘as’ object. In these works, the main conceptual premise is how far can you push the creation of a painting, or the traditional notion of a painting, before it dissolves into being read as an object, architecture, design, or nothing at all. Ultimately these paintings confront the traditions of painting into a tensity between art and non-art, existing within authorship, the monochrome, painting ‘as’ object, architectural motif and the everyday.
The works are constructed through a process where wood is hand cut, not measured or ruled up, allowing the intuitive construction and slight wobble in the form’s edge to be left as a sign of construction. The wood panels (that have canvas stretched over them) are associated with topology, a subdivision of geometry, which deals with characteristics of geometric figures that are preserved despite certain deformations. These occur in the frame’s edge, not its field. The tension between this creates a form of construction that appears miss-constructed where the un-level, un-square, warped edges are the structural parameters of the painting but are also falling out of the paintings frontal field over the edges through its application of paint. In these paintings, the edge becomes an act of divergence where small changes in the edge of the frame (the traditional notion of what a painting frame is, its geometry and structure as a square or rectangle) is challenged and these works are as much about what is outside the frame as within.
The series of misshaped panels challenge the notion that the reading of a painting is all about its surface; as such, by juxtaposing one paintings scale to the next creates a multi-reading within the paintings collectively, where the viewer can read each painting potentially as a coloured void and/or object in relation to the wall that it’s located against, considering the work in relation to the architecture that the work exists within; or considering the tonal weight of the colour/s used singularly and collectively. The relationship of the shape of the painting to the wall and the room creates synergetic notions of space where the physicality of it, the paintings shaped space (as both surface field and as object) and the remainder of the exhibition space, combines as transitional units. In this sense the shaped paintings are not autonomous units, instead, they are composed of the painted-shaped frame placed on the wall together with its negative, the space sitting outside its edge. Within this there is a relationship between frame construction, tonal presence and space, and the parallel relationship of painting, space, and viewer. The paintings are not just about responding metaphysically to the works in terms of colour, line, and scale, but are also about the angle at which the viewer is standing to the work, their position within the space and the positions of the other works within this same space.
Artist Statement, 2023
WHAT YOU SEE IS YOU
When an artist is asked what kind of paintings, they ‘make’, it is in the response where initial interpretation is key to providing visual answers. For the landscape, figurative, abstract or portrait artist, there is an instantaneous visual connection; whether the genre is agreeable to the viewer or not, an understood association is instantly established. For the monochrome painter, however, the answer can easily be misinterpreted as a kind of conceptualised notion of potential possibilities; a suggested idea of other, resulting in a sense of disconnect or possible unknown. For Kyle Jenkins, the answer is in the question, and the question is exactly what he’s challenging and bringing to the fore in this series of artworks.
For artists embarking on producing monochrome paintings, they’re aware it can never, not acknowledge its own history. Jenkins’ practice is engaged with collapsing historical and physical attributes of painting, such as shape, colour, composition, tone, and flatness into the one constructed object, to question the possibilities of what painting can be today. There are considered applications such as tonal value and crafted edges, that reflect his intended aesthetic and conceptual intentions, as well as an acknowledgement of artists before him, who investigated ideas including appropriation and authorship in relationship to the monochrome. What is timely though, about this exhibition and group of highly constructed monochrome paintings, is that Jenkins has intentionally made them to be viewed and engaged with by an audience in the third decade of the 21st century. Through their painterly application and physical presence, these CELARE paintings bring new ideas of authorship, absence, and appropriation, historically associated with monochrome painting, and confront notions of identity, simply by being painted in an era where our sense of self is challenged by a visual culture that’s saturated by an influx of digital imagery.
This digital culture provides information to be visually downloaded or subsumed via various mediums and devices that are rapidly distributed and automatically communicated, either as images, text, and or sound. In particular, when viewing images via digital technology, the screen appears to flatten potential edges and objects, at once offering up a seamless illusion whilst simultaneously preventing us from focusing on any one thing. This creates a strategy of withdrawal from ‘experiencing’ the full essence of the subject or image, in turn, limiting our perspectives of being in the world.
The speed at which we consume visual information via a screen, where one image from one time and place is collapsed on top of the next, combined with reduced details (materiality) of how an artwork’s physicality (such as brush marks, colour, tonal variations etc.), offers up delusions of photo-real impressions, creating false truths and disorientated understandings of reality. For monochrome painting, and the viewing of it through a screen, blocks of monochromatic fields appear to negate any suggestion of historical or conceptual narrative, reducing any DIY aesthetic qualities. When viewed in the gallery or physical space, monochrome paintings reveal their material details of construction. Additionally, the viewer is drawn into the work on a more intimate level, inviting them in to take a closer look, experiencing the artists ideas / paintings more personally. It is here that a level of presence in the works is negated by digital technology and a redirecting of the viewer’s focus away from the physicality of a painting’s construction, occurs. Any focus on painterly issues such as materiality, perception, production, and interpretation, are reduced, and when this occurs, so too are ideas and notions of the self.
In Jenkins’ CELARE works he uses the practice of painting to problem-solve associated issues related to colour, surface, and construction; a way of wearing his heart on his sleeve (so to speak), revealing potential struggles or organisational issues related to the manufacturing of the paintings. Issues such as colour placement, or dealings with edges and irregular forms, emphasising negative spaces between the works, considering the architecture, and exaggerating the picture planes flatness, are all ways for him to discover potential realities that look at the nature of painting and how far it can be pushed, or minimised, to reconstruct it. Jenkins questions ‘what is painting and how do we experience it’, through this interrogation, and as such an element of empathy is ignited in the viewer, and so too are new notions of truths and authorship.
All these painterly issues, both physical and conceptual, are so closely entwined with the genre of monochrome painting and are essential to being seen and experienced first-hand. Jenkins knows that potentially, most of the audience for these paintings will be viewing the work through a screen. He makes no apologies for this, and through his unwavering investigation, dares the audience to do the work too. They need to get in front of the paintings, and by doing so see beyond any false, digital seamless imperfections, into new perspectives and truths. These monochrome paintings mirror Jenkin’s authentic self, through their constructed nature and irregular physicality combined with intentional and considered details, they could be interpreted as self-portraiture, exposing his search for truth, that simultaneously offers room for his viewer to do the same, to bring us all back to really seeing and experiencing ourselves, through the work. It is in this way, the CELARE paintings act as a group of paintings that are collaborative in nature, whereby they offer ways for the audience to connect back with the physicality of themselves, the world around them, and each other.
Tarn McLean
Dr Tarn McLean is an artist, designer, and Doctor of Philosophy (Visual Art) and founded the Australian accessories and textile company Ocre Designs in 2008.
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Merric brettle: Physcopomp: In The Eye of The Beholder
Merric Brettle
29.03.23 - 06.05.23
Merric Brettle: Physcopomp: In The Eye of The Beholder
As an artist, I make work about our relationship with the world in which we live, and what is fundamental to me is exploring and expressing this aim in the work’s production.
Central to my methodology is an exploration and use of the ephemeral as this would be the sociocultural associations of various aspects of things in the world such as material, text and context etc.
This description of what I do ‘gets under the hood’ of my practice, and directly relates the methodology I use to the construction of meaning. I have been using an experimental arts practice to make work for the last twenty years. This methodology explores creativity as the product of a clash between the artist and their subject/reality. Making work in this way, I try and capture the presences of both my subject and myself, as these would be my sense for example of the socio-cultural associations of my subject and also the sense of ‘me’ generated by my expressiowithin fabrication. I then explore a resonance or reverberating relationship of cause and effect, between these presences, and personally reflect on its nature as I make work and construct meaning.
This reveals the way that I use an understanding of the presences of my subject and myself, as exploring them helps me make work. When reading my work however, the viewer considers this use a little differently. That is, as they explore this resonance as it would support what I say. It is in this way that understanding the presences and resonance between them that guided my construction, that the viewer considers an emotional/conceptual framework within which understand nuance and complexity within what the work refers to. In this way this resonance functions much in the same way as a painter’s brushstroke, as it puts emotional inflection on a piece.
To illustrate I first used this methodology in a series of works that explore our relationship to a constructed urban landscape. In these works, I captured the presence of my subject by employing the materials and methods of its construction like concrete, plastic and vacuum forming etc. not only because the allowed me to fabricate something but also for their socio-cultural associations.
My presence was then captured in the forms I created and the idiosyncratic way in which I explored the expressive possibilities of these ‘found’ materials and methods. When constructing meaning in the work I explored the resonance between these two presences as I made work about the way that we construct this landscape, but are never able to produce exactly what we want.
This reveals the way that I use the ephemeral as it would guide what I make the work about. When the viewer considers it however, they do so a little differently. That is, as it would give the work emotional inflection. To illustrate, I hoped for the viewer to read these presences and their resonance between them as they would reveal a landscape that is banal toxic and distorting, yet somehow beautiful, alluring and an expression of hope. It was in this way that I hoped for this resonance to give my work emotional depth much in the same way that a brush stroke or texture would. Making work in this way I hoped for the viewers to consider the nature of our relationship to this constructed reality as it would not only reflect our hopes and human abilities to realise them, but also our limits, failings and inability to avoid them.
Employing this methodology, I do not illustrate an idea but create contemplative pieces in which I hope for the viewer to explore sense, presence and resonance as they would express a more nuanced understanding of what the work refers to.
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This kind of methodology can be simply ‘aimed’ at other subjects and it was with this in mind that I decided to explore our relationship with a now digitised social reality. That is as a social reality is a mixture of the ‘forms’ of our social relations that we interact with and the collective codification of reality that we use as a lens through which to see the world. Because this new subject has no physicality in itself, I started to explore text and text construction methods as my materials and methods. In particular, I explored this text as images and image construction techniques. I did not think that making this shift would be a difficult task, because if there is anything that expresses the ‘presence’ or sense of a social reality, then it is this form of text. I soon discovered however, that this change in subject would create fundamental problems for my methodology. The situation was that because images have no physicality in themselves, I couldn’t capture the presence or sense of my subject in the works materially as I had previously done. The effect of this was that I had an either/or choice between capturing the presence of my subject or my own in the forms I made.
This created a crisis in my methodology, which made not only making work difficult, but also, I realised, reading the work. Consequently, I became determined to find a way to capture these two presences in a piece. I managed to do this via collecting and remaking samples of images and image construction techniques from the Internet. These samples captured the socio-cultural associations/presence of my subject in themselves as they referred to something, while their transliteration from screen images to painted object using spray paint and sign writing vinyl captured mine. My presence was thus no longer in the forms of the work, but in its physicality, and so existed in for example the overlapping of paints between forms, the use of glazes to capture the effect of backlighting and an exploration of the logic of pixilation. This resolved my issue because the works were able to perform something like a cognitive ‘gestalt flip’. That is that like the classic optical illusion in which an image can be seen to ‘flip’ between being a depiction of a rabbit and duck, that these works could also ‘flip’ between being seen as either a sample/found image or an abstract minimalist painting.
This resolution however, created other problems because in locating the presence of my subject in the forms I create and myself in its physicality, I no longer had access to these forms as they could refer to anything. The implications of this was that I couldn’t make the works ‘about’ the relationship between the individual and my subject. I found this incredibly frustrating because this is in essence the ‘point’ of my methodology as an exploration. Consequently, I now had to find some way in which to allow for the works to refer to something, without displacing or destroying the presence of myself or my subject. The resolution I came up with was to explore different physical separations in the work that allowed for me to put either presences or references within them and thus allowing for all to be read in resonance.
To illustrate, I explored the use of different materials to make collage like works in which these images could be seen as separate or together thus preserving the presence in them of my subject while allowing for the relationship between images to refer to something else. I also started to join different panels that would allow for the use of one as a sample and the other as a vehicle for referring to my ideas. I then started to use the sides of the panels and their relationship with a wall as other places where I could locate a presence or a reference to something. It was with these separations therefore, that I felt I now had a whole lot of compartments or what to me seemed to be conceptual planes within which to locate presences and references and explore resonance between them.
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There is still much that needs to be considered and explained about this expansion of my methodology, but what I can do now is explain the relationship between production and meaning as I both make work and hope for it to be read.
Exploring the nature of my subject with my methodology, I have come to the belief that while a social reality exists, that it is constituted by our projections. Within this framework, I have also come to believe that while we are objective to it as it would be constructed by others projections, we are not objective to it as it would also be constructed by our own. Consequently, I feel that before we can describe this construct and our relationship to it, that we must first understand how we can ‘see’ it as it would be other to us yet not.
The works in this exhibition express/explore this belief and so when considering the references within them, they all relate to the way that our projections are part of what we see even when we are perceiving the projections of others. When contemplating the physicalities of the work by contrast, I would like the viewer to think about the way that I explored my presence in relationship to the samples I use as it would create a reverberating relationship with the works, and in doing this see this relationship as a metaphor for that which we have with a social reality as we can ‘see’ it. It is thus for example, that I would first like the viewer to explore my ‘marks’ as they would be evidence of me ‘within the image/samples’ as there is ‘stuff’ in the glazes, ‘under the image’ as it would relate to the textures that exists, ‘on top of the image’ in the vinyl on top of the paint, and ‘other than the image’ as I would explore ‘around’ the panel or behind it. I would then like them to think about the way that the sense of a reverberating shifting surface that tracing of marks would suggest, would be a metaphor for the kind of vibrating immediacy that I think we need to understand that we have with a social reality before we see it.
When thinking about my personal perspective on a social reality, I do not attempt to describe the perspective I think we should construct, but only the perspective that I explored on the way that we may see that reality as it would be partly our projection. To express this, I would hope for the viewer to explore my ‘marks’ in the work as they would provide them with a metaphor for the experience I had. Consequently, I would like for them to explore the way that they are formally pulled into the works by some of these marks, pushed out by others, and made to go around them etc by yet others as they would in essence ‘step into my shoes’. It is in this way that I would hope they then think about what it means to be ‘in the eye of the beholder’.
Artist Statement, 2023
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retrovision: jean-charles Blais - christian bonnefoi - maurice cockrill
In Collaboration with Annandale Galleries, Blockprojects is pleased to present Retrovision, an exhibition of exceptional paintings and works on paper by three iconic European artists: Jean-Charles Blais, Christian Bonnefoi and Maurice Cockrill.
28.02.2023 – 25.03.2023
Installation images, Retrovision: Jean-Charles Blais - Christian Bonnefoi & Maurice Cockrill . Blockprojects, 2023. Photography: Simon Strong
In Collaboration with Annandale Galleries, Blockprojects is pleased to present, Retrovision, an exhibition of exceptional paintings and works on paper by three iconic European artist of the 1980s and 1990s: Jean-Charles Blais, Christian Bonnefoi and Maurice Cockrill.
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ross a. waterman: nick cave: shot live 2007-2017 signs of love
Ross A. Waterman
03.12.22-14.01.23
Ross A. Waterman : Signs of Love
At a Grinderman Show 2017
‘I love you’
Nick replied, ‘Thank-you’ The woman responded, ‘Do you love me?’
Nick hesitated then answered, ‘ I don’t even know you’
The woman returned, with son anguish in her voice, ‘But l love you’
The band were smiling, and the audience was listening.
Nick looked at the band, smiled back and then admitted, ‘Oh, l love you to, then’.
Everyone was happy, and possibly at that very moment, Nick learnt to love that unknown fan and perhaps every unknown fan that inhabits his world.
SIGNS OF LOVE
Signs of Love is three installations of photographs, consisting of 104 parts, shot live across 10 years.
The first installation spans from Nick Cave Solo/Grinderman in 2007 to Nick Cave in Concert in 2014. The second installation is the 2017 Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Skeleton Tree tour from Hobart to Melbourne, and the third picks up the tour in New York, in June 2017, and leaves it in Vancouver.
These installations are a form of expressionism that reflect Cave’s ever-powerful, emotive songs, music, and performances. The Signs of Love series deal with time, passage, atmosphere, mood, energy, light and its desired absence, and the shifting nature of Cave’s relationship with his audiences.
From 2007, Cave underwent a gradual metamorphosis from a performer who dramatically inhabited a stage and prowled the confines of it, confronting those who needed to stand near or against it. Cave used these fans as props, he pointed at them, confessed to them, sang to them, yelled at them, and protected them. Then Cave started to reach out to them, to hold their hands, as they held his hand.
The change in this relationship with his audience can be seen when contrasting Held Aloft 2013 (from Signs of Love 1) where Cave entered the audience to be held above them, to The Believers 2017 (from Signs of Love 3) where Cave entered the audience to be with them. Both are wonderful but different.
During the Skeleton Tree tour of North America, Cave began to invite his audience onto the stage, the inner sanctum, to sing with him, to dance with him, to encircle him, then to sit, while he left the stage and moved into theatres of adoring fans. To be with them in their room, to trust them, to show faith in them, to touch them gently, to sing with them, to scream at them, to be surrounded by them, to have them experience his manifestation, to attest and profess his love to them, his amazed unknown fans.
Those fans in turn reached out to him, they pointed back, they recorded and expressed their awe and their joy, and they laid their hands upon him. They become a part of it all, and their signs of love and devotion abounded. They were no longer viewers of the show, they were the show. They were with him.
Nick Cave’s despair, his hope, his faith, and his signs of love were realised, they had found a home.
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james clayden: flights of fancy
David Thomas
12.11.22-30.11.22
James Clayden : Flight of Fancy Installation Images
‘‘To me, great abstraction has always represented mystery. The literal or the realist painting grapples and passes with a moment. It merely records a single grain of sand on the eternal beach. Great abstract paintings deepen the mystery of our existence but also emote the feeling of the eternal. I feel that Clayden has always been in this zone of deep questioning but has an insightful understanding of what we have to get done in our nominated period as human beings. The mantra.
When l have had the privilege of standing in front of some of the greatest abstract paintings ever made, from east to west, they have all had a commonality of making me feel that there is something strange and mysterious beyond the physical and material world. I have had this feeling on many occasions in front of Clayden paintings. It is as if he has an understanding of that mystery, an insight that has come from humility and a dense art practice that has never followed fashion trends. A true gift of new conditions and discoveries. A moment of insight that gives us a reason that it all meant something to exist on this mystical spinning ball in space.’
Jeremy Kibel
ARTWORKS:
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zai kuang : silent ritual
Zai Kuang
08.10.22-29.06.22
Installation images, Zai Zuang, Silent Ritual.
Silent Ritual
ARTWORKS:
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david thomas : small works
David Thomas
07.09.22-01.10.22
Blockprojects Images | Installation Images courtesy of Heide Museum MOMA : Love Poem to Life 6th August - 6th November, 2022.
“It’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting.” - Pierre Bonnard
ON PAINTING AND TIME
PAINTING’S RESURRECTION. As a young art student in the 1970s I learnt that painting was dead, not house painting, the other sort, on canvasesand the like. Apparently painting in the Western world died again in1980s after a “reactionary” revival. Recently however the situation has changed in Australia and abroad. Painting is back. (To be honest it never went away, all that was for dramatic effect). Today the radical potential of paintingisbeing re-valued and resurrected asa dynamic generator of ideas, forms,of knowing and feeling. Painting’s radicalism, complexity, diversity, materiality, historicity as a mobile field of imaginative and material play, reflection and research is being explored more now than ever.
ARTWORKS:
enquire.
the colour & the shape
10.08.2022 – 03.09.2022
Installation images, The Colour & The Shape. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
Blockprojects is please to present The Colour & The Shape, a group exhibition exploring the visual language between shape, form, colour and line in abstraction.
ARTISTS:
Steven Asquith, James Clayden, David Freney-Mills, Jason Haufe, Kyle Jenkins, Paul Newcombe, Tom Vincent, David Wallage.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
georgia biggs: firefighter
Georgia Biggs
13.07.22-06.08.22
Studio images, Georgia Biggs:
Break and enter
In a recent podcast, contemporary artists Keltie Ferris and Peter Halley mull over the challenges and mysteries that present themselves when making paintings. They have known one another for some time – Halley wasFerris’ teacher at the Yale School of Art – and their conversation meanders in tangents, exploring thedecisions that have built their painting practices. Both artists could be seen to be working within contemporary abstraction (although Halley refutes this in the podcast). Ferris makes gestural paintings using spray paint,airbrush and stenciling techniques; Halley creates hard-edged works in a jarring acidic palette that reference prisons and cells. Both artists are united by their interests in the fragment representing the whole, colour, forms of networks and freeing painting from its predecessors, and they flit back and forth from art history as they unpack their lineages.
At one point in the podcast, Abstract Expressionist icon Joan Mitchell comes up. Halley states, on looking at herworks: “They drive me crazy, they’re so tortured!”[1] The expression seems to come with both surprise and reverence,as if he didn’t expect Mitchell’s paintings could do that, and as if they had only recently hit him with their full intensity. Mitchell’s paintings are intense. Made often using sky blues, greens, lilacs and golden yellows on crisp white grounds,they are frequently read as being of nature – a reference encouraged by Mitchell herself when she declared some ofher early pieces “expressionist landscapes.” With nature too often perceived as a controllable and sweet-temperedother in the West – a somewhere and something separate from humans, not an uncontrollable force to which webelong – I wonder if this reference has diluted readings of her work from time to time, making these paintings seem morepassive than they are.
Mitchell’s paintings, for the most part, are ferocious and obsessive, made of many stabbing gestures embroiled infrenetic whirlpools of intensifying colour. They are like birds smashing into each other in flight. Bombs of confetti,blood, guts, garbage, streamers. The sonic fireworks of road rage. If natural, they are heavily weighted cloudsbringing storms; less often, whispery ones swelling for a light shower. The marks in Mitchell’s work come from a placeof deep physicality, drama and gusto. I think about Mitchell when I look at the paintings of Georgia Biggs.
I visited Biggs’ studio when her works for Firefighter were either complete or almost there. Located in Melbourne’s inner west, her studio is a long room without windows, where the institutional hum of fluorescent lights provides an evenand unaffected glow for making paintings. At the end of the space, a dozen huge works huddled like oddarchitectures, their faces to the wall, bars exposed. Paint congealed in piles, like ant mounds sporadically spewing out across the floor, scarring the walls, too.
On her large, raised desk was a stack of small waxy drawings. Their colours were saturated blues and magentas – ajarring yet paradoxically analogous combination, replete with scratches that revealed other colours and marksunderneath. The wax drawings show something of a singular set of actions that are built again and again into Biggs’large paintings in different ways. Also, the magenta reminded me of what German artist Albert Oehlen once said about his “psychopathic” tree paintings from around 2015:“Magenta is a hysterical colour somehow.”[2]
Despite my unease around using the word hysterical in relation to artwork made by a woman, I kept thinking about Biggs and her energy in connection to Oehlen’s. On the internet, there is a video[3] that was uploaded during the height of the pandemic of Oehlen’s studio process, set to music created by German artist Tim Berresheim – a rollercoaster of noise, high-pitched glitches and low drones. In the video, Oehlen mixes paint until it gets muddier and more contaminated with random rubbish, other colours, crusty and thickening old medium. Oehlen then trails the paint mixture across the surface of an almost-there painting he created at some earlier stage. The effect is mesmerising and wonderful, but also quite hysterical, neurotic, joyful in an ecstatic way, cathartic as if Oehlen was receiving something delirious from the painting just as he was giving everything to it via an umbilical-like connection.
Biggs’ new exhibition Firefighter features seven large-scale paintings made over the course of three years. The extended time taken to make these works does not speak of labour but a shared experience between the artist and the paintings – a figuring out of things together, not of an artist doing “work” by adding elements to a painting through a well-understood process until it reaches completion in a certain period of time. Biggs could never plan how long apainting would take her and would refuse a short deadline; her process involves going to the studio and giving andtaking from the work until a rendition of the piece hits its existential chord. Unifying this body of work is a mysterious swirling motif that seems to move, like a weather pattern or a set of eyes, across and through the paintings. Sometimes these swirls and circles appear as clear and individual forms reminiscent of Mitchell’s bundles of energy,while at other times they show themselves more obliquely as a compositional force or centrifuge within the field.
Biggs’ highly physical process is spontaneous and involves layering materials, colours and gestures onto the surfaceof her works during committed and physical studio visits. At times the paintings are hung on the wall, while at othertimes they are laid on the floor so Biggs can pour and manipulate greater quantities of liquid media on their surface. Keep in mind, these paintings are large, and as each layer is added, they amass weight; moving the pieces is aphysical act unto itself. A studio day is complete when the work needs to dry or because Biggs is utterly exhaustedfrom the intensity of the process. When she returns, the painting and the artist pick up where they left off, adding depth through another medium or through an intense process of excavation and removal (Biggs often uses Stanley knives or other sharp objects to scrape back into her paintings' densely built surfaces).
Like the actions taken to create such epic works, the mediums she chooses are also varied: oil paint, glue, ink, painting mediums and paper to name just a few; materials whose chemistry or historical use suggests they maybeshouldn’t go together, but, somehow, they work. There is nothing delicate or planned about how Biggs paints. Instead, there is an understanding of materials, colour and gesture, a commitment to each layer, and deep faith in the process.
It would be near impossible to experience Biggs' work and not be reminded of a series of post-war abstract paintingmovements that sprung up across the world in the mid-twentieth century, fuelled by a psychological imperative and a mix of anger, trauma and passion at the then-current state of things. In2011, American artist Amy Sillman went to bat for Abstract Expressionism and more recent practices that havelooked to it for inspiration or belonging.[4] Sillman opens by unpacking the age-old machismo with which themovement is associated. Unimpressed by the conservative “gender essentialism” layered on these works, and themovement's degradation by certain writers who labelled it as “vulgar,” she chooses to relate these assertions to Susan Sontag’s essay from 1964, “Notes on Camp”: “The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, thelover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity.”[5]
Vulgarity (perhaps like hysteria) comes to mind when I look at Biggs’ works, with sincere appreciation. The paintingsin Firefighter are great-looking images but they are even more incredible objects. To be with these works in personreminds you of how material feels, of how it is human and imperfect (thus, perfect). Being with these works remindsme that making paintings like these cancels out the rejection of expressive practices and intuitive knowledge (not justwithin painting but also more broadly in society) and instead revels in what the body knows how to do – a connectionthat Sillman was not surprised has been adopted by queer and women artists in exciting ways post-AbstractExpressionism. I can’t help but think of how the Gutai artists of Japan sought to free painting from the frame, makingnot “kaiga” (traditional paintings) but “e” – a term they coined for “expanded painting"; and French artist Jean Fautrierof the European Tachisme movement, with his gritty surfaces that expressed the trauma of the time but still resonatedwith their jewel-like beauty. As per Sontag, vulgarity is not a dirty word.
Returning to Sillman, she describes how American painter, printmaker and draughtsperson Elizabeth Murray taughtthe students in her class at art school “to break and enter painting.”[6] I reflect on this idea when I think of Biggs’ work but also when I consider the title of her exhibition, Firefighter. What is needed to enter into a scenario or contract inwhich you make work from such a vulnerable place, where you are aware of the battle (in the work and potentially in yourself) when you head off to the studio that day? To break and enter painting might be seen as a way of expandingpainting from its traditional histories. It might be about how the object of painting can be deconstructed and presentedin an alternative way. But to break and enter painting could also be a physical and psychological strength required tomake Biggs’ kind of work, a commitment to embrace all the intensities that process throws up, and the tenacity in knowing that, through those interactions, something vital and of abundant energy will come to be.
Laura Skerlj
___________________
1. Taylor Dafoe, “Keltie Ferris and Peter Halley on the Mysterious Joys of Making a Painting,” September 7, 2021, The Art Angle, podcast, https://getpodcast.com/podcast/the-art-angle/keltie-ferris-and-peter-halley-on-the-mysterious-joys-of-making-a-pain_585d8b6e1d
2 Sean O’Hagan, “Albert Oehlen: 'There's something hysterical about magenta',” The Guardian, February 6, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/feb/05/albert-oehlen-interview-gagosian-gallery-london
3. Gagosian, “Albert Oehlen: In the Studio,” Gagosian Quarterly, April 7, 2021, video,https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2021/04/07/video-albert-oehlen-in-the-studio/
4. Amy Sillman, “AbEx and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II,” Artforum 49, no. 10 (Summer 2011): 321–325, https://www.amysillman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201107_AbExandDiscoBalls.pdf
5. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (Penguin, 2018 [1964]).
6. Amy Sillman, “Flashlight: The Signal of Elizabeth Murray's Paintings,” Texte Zur Kunst (June 2021): 170–177,https://www.amysillman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/20210600_AmySIllman_Murray_TzK_essay.pdf
ARTWORKS:
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jarryd cooper: An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus.
Jarryd Cooper
15.06.22-09.07.22
Installation images, Jarryd Cooper: An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus . Blockprojects, 2022. Photography: Simon Strong
I read somewhere that the human brain is incapable of comprehending the negative. Which is to say: I tell you not to think of a banana. You are now thinking of a banana. There is no programming in the software of our logic to safeguard against imagining what we are told not to imagine. Let’s twist this idea. I’ll tell you to think of something, but that something doesn’t exist. What are you thinking of now, when pondering this non-existent thing? An expanse? A never-ending nowhere? A spiral, a collapse, a place where everything is dissolving?
Jarryd Cooper’s paintings don’t exist. Does that make sense? Of course it doesn’t, but it’s not supposed to. An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus is a challenge to the simultaneous expansiveness and non-reality of painting. Concerned with the idea of the hyperobject – entities that are simultaneously entirely real yet wholly beyond our comprehension – these works jolt and sweep between what is known and what could never be known.
As prefix, hyper refers to something that is more than, something that is over, above, beyond. What exists in the realm denoted by hyper stretches beyond our perception of original meaning. To imagine the hyperobject is to imagine something that doesn’t exist. It is an attempt to grasp that which is too vast, too transient, too mercurial, to the point that conventional definitions and ideas of what the object was in the first place are lost in time and space. In this way, An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus is self-referential; every painting is a view into the hyperobject of painting itself, the non-existent thing I asked you to imagine.
Here, with each technicolour dreamscape, we find ourselves on the far side of the beyond. Jarryd Cooper presents work that stretches beyond the painting into a realm of non-reality. Each of the canvases, executed in vivid hues with equal parts precision and frenzy, are portals to the infinite. They are worlds within worlds within worlds, constantly circling, dissolving, unraveling. The painting is granted agency, kept alive by the artist’s ability to trust equally in improvisation as in the formality of the line. Each form we see would have us believe that we are perceiving something known to us but, just as quickly, the shape fades, collapsing in on itself and escaping our understanding in a hurry of colour and movement.
A note, pinned to temporary walling, in the artist’s studio posed the following question: what is information and what is noise? Each of these paintings seem to be asking that same question in their own right, repeating it to us again and again as they hurriedly shift between these points on a continuum. Just as with the hyperobject, the answer to the question of these paintings, to the contemporary chaos of sorting noise from information, is apparent while remaining beyond grasp. The purpose of painting then, of these paintings especially, is not to pin down the meaning of one single canvas but to view them in the context of all paintings ever, an obscure measure that expands, on and on and on, into infinity, beyond all comprehension.
Claire Summers
ARTWORKS:
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Marc freeman: Nimbus
Marc Freeman
18.05.22-11.06.22
Installation images, Marc Freeman; Nimbus . Blockprojects, 2022. Photography: Simon Strong
NIMBUS
“The plants which have surrounded my home studio over the last two years, have made their way into this recent body of work. It’s been an interesting way to incorporate pictorial elements into a largely abstract dialogue. In some ways, it has been cathartic in distinguishing this period while also possessing an element of personal symbolism.”
ARTWORKS:
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stephen eastaugh: ID (SOMEWAYS SEARCHING SOMEWHERE TO SOMEHOW SEE SOMETHING OR SOMEONE FOR SOMETIME) SERIES
Stephen Eastaugh
22.04.22-14.05.22
Installation images, Stephen Eastaugh; ID (Someways Searching Somewhere to Somehow See Something or Someone for Sometime.) Series. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
ID = Identification. Any official document with your name and photograph or other information on it that you use to prove who you are.
ID = In psychoanalysis the ID is the deepest part of the unconscious mind that represents the most innate human needs and emotions such as hunger, joy, lust and anger.
ARTIST STATEMENT
This collection of documents documents a portion of my physical and conceptual passage of mostly safe conduct between the years 1982 and 2016. Eighty-four pages of expired Australian passports have been torn from the history of my extensive wander-lusting across seven continents and many oceans. A stray psycho-geographical flavour is found in this ID series as it playfully meanders over imagined and administered landscapes both urban and extremely remote in order to locate new vantage points.
I construct a visual travelogue with the visas, stamps, scribbles, dates and signatures of officialdom alongside my own organic vistas, marks, stitches, stains and attachments. A panoramic work connecting each scene via a single undulating horizon line which suggests a constant and steady drifting across longitudes and latitudes. Pages peppered with bureaucratic ink, topographical lumps, waves, clouds, pools, rocky terrains and a babble of foreign languages all paving the way to elsewhere.
An elongated wondering title, textured hills, watermarks, miniature but expansive views, human scribbles, exotic symbols and decades of my registered global pilgrimage clearly display an unsettled and unrelenting desire for travel. Humans have a basic need to move and that fact I have passionately embraced. I am hard-wired with a lust for a journey. All I need is a passport.
Passports are basically identification papers based on an ancient British document issued way back in 1414 so for over five hundred years fancy inscribed paper sheets have been in the luggage of lucky travellers. After the first world war the little blue, green or red passport booklet that we all recognise began to be used by anyone legally travelling internationally. I have managed to fill many passport pages with data and assorted official marks that have enabled me to cross hundreds of borders, to state where I have been and to prove that I am who I am.
These sheets of formal abstracted paperwork combined with my own informal physical legwork has made searching somewhere someway somehow to see something or someone for sometime very real, often surprising and the views have always been somewhat worthwhile.
ARTWORKS:
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now & then : 40 years of abstraction
08.04.2022 – 16.04.2022
Installation images, Now & Then : 40 Years of Abstraction . Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
This group exhibition features a selection of abstract works from the last 40 years.
ARTISTS:
Steven Asquith, Neil Keith Baker, Stephen Bram, Merric Brettle, James Clayden, Dan Dan Dai, Robert Jacks
Dale Frank, Marc Freeman, Denise Green, Kyle Jenkin, Michael Staniak, John Nixon, Julia Powles, David Thomas, Vivian Cooper Smith, Tom Vincent, Peter Westwood, what.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
vivian cooper smith: losing ground
Vivian Cooper Smith
03.03.21-26.03.22
Installation images, Vivian Cooper Smith; Losing Ground . Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
Vivian and I share an unusually similar background (ask us about it sometime it is scary in the details how similar). We were both raised in families who followed a strong belief system. A system that gave hard edges to understanding life based around and through the idea of death. So, it was probably no surprise that we both ended up working with a medium – photography – that arguably carries with it the parallels to this belief system. To believe in this photographic system though one has to be blind to the ground – to the medium.
The ground of the image, within painting, is understood as that which can’t be seen but forms the base of the image. In photography arguably the medium itself is the equivalent. It is overlooked for its ability to represent. That the medium is transparent though, is a myth, “a bit of bourgeois folklore” that perpetuates the ideology of control/ownership/power. Understanding this, Vivian’s work brings the ground – the medium – to the forefront to allow him to ask questions of hard edges, of certainty. His aporetic methods of working are used to try and find something as much through what-it-is-not as with what-it-is.
Through his work it seems to me that Vivian wants to expose the ground to make our belief unstable. To ask questions for himself and allow us to ask questions too. Vivian upends the representation relationship of figure-ground creating a space of visual unsuredness. In so doing he also upends the myth of the medium as transparent ground. He brings it to the forefront. Refuting the representational understanding of the photograph to the point where his images can only be understood as the medium itself – photography. In this action of upending to expose (bad photography pun intended) that which is most often ignored or overlooked in photographs – the photography – Vivian challenges us to ask “what is a photograph”? To state a belief by allowing us to see the possibility of what it is not. Staking a firm position through instability.
Dr Kiron Robinson
Artist Statement
I travelled a lot as a kid. Many schools, different homes and friends all over. It was a unique upbringing but one that left a legacy. A feeling of ‘groundlessness’. I was always having to reorient myself to changing circumstances, new faces and places. Belonging takes time. When it happened it was by building relationships – softening the boundaries – so I wasn’t so obvious. Sometimes there wasn’t enough time and I remained the stranger.
I now accept this itinerant feeling and try and see it as a positive or generative one. When the measures of your identity are always shifting you have to work a bit harder to establish that core. You learn not to rely on externalities – people, places, things to provide that grounding. In a way, this is also how I approach photography. The photographs I make don’t tell you everything. They don’t tell a story or reveal a secret. When someone looks at an photograph I’ve made they are looking at the world through my eyes. It is a world built on transition and uncertainty where not everything has a place. Rather than something to be avoided though, this uncertainty holds the promise of new ways of seeing, of being.
ARTWORKS:
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james clayden: untitled series windows, memory & night - 36 paintings
James Clayden
27.01.22-20.02.22
Installation images, James Clayden, Untitled Series Windows, Memory & Night - 36 Paintings. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
ARTWORKS:
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JORDAN GRANT: IN THE BEGINNING A STAR, WHEN DRAWN WITH NAIL INTO BRICK, LOOKED AS FOLLOWS
Jordan Grant
08.12.21-22.01.22
Installation images, Jordan Grant; In The Beginning a Star, when Drawn with Nail into Brick, looked as Follows . Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
JORDAN GRANT: IN THE BEGINNING A STAR, WHEN DRAWN WITH NAIL INTO BRICK, LOOKED AS FOLLOWS
Spaces of wordless immediacy
Thoughts on the painting practice of Australian artist Jordan Grant for his exhibition: In the beginning a star, when drawn with nail into brick, looked as follows.
Words, symbols, and signs can be unreliable. We like to think that language (written, verbal or aural) can be solid, but of course it’s equally sensory, vague, and general, forming though abstract and figurative idioms. Symbols and signs can seem objective, pointing to actions, objects, places, and atmospheres, but symbols are also subjective, and this influences our interpretation of them. Given this, one might say that meaning, from a semiotic vantage, is to various degrees contingent- a denotation as well as connotation. Language of any sort can never be a transparent tool for representing things, and particularly as it is the central mode through which to express power relationships¹.
Jordan Grant is acutely aware of the functions of language and signs as he makes contact in his paintings with what might best be described as an unfixed space full of emerging or retreating signs- a mixture of visual languages. The imagery appears to hold quauties that represent moments of arrival, where certain signs and shapes or the occasional abstruse word manifest within the work, while other elements seem to be embryonic. The paintings appear at times to have crystalised as a fragile and delicate moment- seemingly to have developed through workings that have simply solidified. At times the forms in his paintings are arcane, frail, delicate, dynamic, scrubby, even cancelled out. Most elements sit on the edge of meaning deferring any real singular clarity, so the paintings seem to be formed through the aim of avoiding lucid representations. They reside within a sensory realm of equivocality, a space that deliberately seems to sidestep being reduced to one thing or another.
In many ways this is in alignment with the notion expressed by art historian T.J. Clark, that elusive painting may be a ‘resistance’ or at least an ethical and political position in relation to the times². Clark’s reflection around elusiveness may indicate a way for painting to avoid being designated, leaving it open to expressing complexity and corresponding contradictions that exist within us, and the world within which we reside. Grant considers the specificity of language, signs, and symbols to be a type of bind between a desire for clarity and the problematic of unintentionally curtailing complex meanings. He seems to have decided that his paintings might just as well sift through unfixed idiosyncratic forms rather than deal with a fate of being classified as something too fixed. And that his ever-changing mutable works might form a valuable intermediary space within which to reflect personally and politically on the feelings of unfolding and ongoing complexities.
The paintings comprise changing transitions, shapes and signs that have been formed through searching and enquiry rather than pre-conception. He confesses to a suspicion around absolute ideas, preferring to escape the definable to arrive at moments of coalescence. This allows for subjectivity to be more at play, rather than tangible principles. He is drawn to French philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s idea of a .. wordless ambivalence in which the same procedures create and retract meaning, ensure and undo the link between perceptions, actions and affects. If there can be such a thing, this is the idea of a language forming visibly as a ‘wordless immediacy’s³.
The paintings communicate more than what we see, as they draw on the idea of our own unconscious mind and its changing moments. We also become aware that, to some degree, the artist has worked through an unconscious cognisance to unify metamorphizing imagery, as well as manage and preserve various fragmentary break-aways. Conversely to the free-flowing forms and shapes, the unification in these paintings is accomplished through analogous colours and reasonably structured compositions that often disclose one space revealing another. There is particularly a revealing or emergent awareness in the compositions where one section of a work may seem to lift, to reveal an interior or back space, evoking the very experience of a painting for the artist as it unfolds and materialises, where things are exposed while sections are layered over The painting’s imageries appear to adapt the idea of ongoing transformation, a type of reflexivity about thinking around making a painting, disclosing the notion that thinking in painting forms through unending constructions and reconstructions.
Theorist James Elkins considers that ‘thinking in painting is thinking as paint’4, where the artist is led by the pre-ordained physiognomies of paint as material. British artist Sonia Boyce refers to this as a ‘post intentionality’ in relation to production, implying that in working with paint an artist may simply assess the direction of a painting via the manner to which the paint unfoldss. In other words, even if determinism regulates an approach to painting, in thinking through painting an artist uncovers open and free actions through the interaction of their conscious/unconscious workings with the material. Paint as a substance is amenable, a resource for multiple ‘becomings’ carrying within it the internal conditions of inventiveness as well as the external limits of constraint. Paint carries within it the indeterminacy of substance as much as it holds energies that form as passages towards the merged implications of mind and matters. This is how, in painting, substances occupy the mind as a series of open and free acts. The experience of paint is always grasped in relation to the moving body, through a reciprocity involving the movement of one’s hand and the movement of material form. In this free- flowing working with paint, visceral combinations arise out of ‘wet into wet’ while subtle touches go together with dry, scabby scrapes and removals, and indeterminant daubs form into elucidations and recognitions within one’s cognisance.
Jordan Grant’s paintings might be considered as alternatives to absolute or definitive ideas in favour of a discourse about how things come about, how we can hold to multiple vantages where the outcome cannot be known, like the imagination. Perhaps the title of his exhibition suggests the difficulty of aiming for something intangible using the paltry tool of paint, the way that language can often be wanting, and earth bound.
Peter Westwood (Dr. Peter Westwood is an academic, artist and researcher living and working in Naarm I Melbourne)
Notes:
1. Foucault, M (1994) The Order of Things, New York: Random House.
2. HockdOrfer, A. and Kroner, T (eds). (2018). Jutta Koether- tour me Madame, Museum Brandhorst Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich: Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, p.243
3. Ranciere, J (2003) The Future of the Image, New York: Verso Books, p. 5.
4. Elkins, J. (1999) The object stares back: on the nature of seeing. Florida: Harvest, p. 113.
5. Fisher, E. and Fortnum, R. (2013). On the value of not knowing: wonder, beginning again and letting be. London: Black Dog Publishing, p. 78.
6. Coole, D. and Frost, D. (2010), New materia/isms: ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Grosz, citing Bergson,p. 150.
