'Still': alternately describing a static moment or an ongoing and perennial state, seems an apt title for this group - paintings and a print that hold natural phenomena in abeyance.
As if frozen in the moment, these images of waterfalls, falling water, darkened voids and plywood hoardings might seem as filmic snapshots unmoored from their wider context, much as when a stills photographer isolates the single image from greater cinematic narratives. Arrested moments in an ever-present enervating flow of imagery and perception.
These new works, building on from a series of 'waterfall' paintings [sourced from extensive photography, edited and mutated, and previously exhibited at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne in the 2018 exhibition Spill] is located in an ambiguous nocturnal realm. Each are abstracted details from the natural world where [as example] our familiar history of the idealised waterfall as wondrous and life-affirming gives way to a darkened unease - becoming more as spectral apparitions "...stylised, reductive and alien". The natural flow of water via gesture is stilled, memorialized, to suggestive and uncanny intent.
In contrast the silvery, splattered and striated hoardings - subjects in several paintings - seem as both ordinary remnants of mundane everyday action and manufactured extractions from the natural world, referring to a history of painting less concerned with fidelity to reality... more in evocation of action and the phenomenological. Yet they remain imbued with clues to their natural source - the flattened grain and texture holding a trace of their multifarious organic origins even as they, as image, evoke shallow 'modernist' space, with their facial aspects as if mute witnesses to time, agency and action.
In these various paintings across subject and method - closer to the photographic in some, to intuitive gesture and abstraction in others, the over-riding intent is to imbue image with a hovering psychological mood, one that incorporates observation, phenomena and it's cognition. Through a relatively reductive restraint, the various striations, gesture and collisions of abstraction and the real, attempt a [likely impossible] stasis - in holding the world still, if only for a moment, as the void inexorably beckons.
Andrew Browne
August 2019
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- TURNER GALLERIES | showcasing contemporary art
at 470 WILLIAM STREET NORTHBRIDGE WESTERN AUSTRALIA 6003 - TURNER GALLERIES HAS NOW CLOSED.
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