paul newcombe: opus
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
