Reviews

The Southwest Connection Nyisztor Studio 391 Canning Highway to August 30

This week we went to the Nyisztor studio at 391 Canning Highway for the first time. It has been there for a while, but, as a non driver, I have always found it just too hard. We were ‘lured’, as the PICA website says, by an excellent exhibition of four artists from the South West, The South-west Connection.

The gallery was the first surprise. It is a former library designed in the sixties and so open, light and airy ideal for artwork. In fact it is one of the best spaces in Perth for contemporary art of all kinds and Ron has done a great job with the conversion.

The largest work in this show Yvonne Nietzreba’s was three metres high, the smallest were Judith Roche’s images of Little South West creatures, 10 cms square. Each was a multi media representation of a winged or crawling creature, an event in nature, attractive in the way nineteenth century lithographs of flora and fauna are attractive, as much for the surprising structure and the incidental event portrayed in each one as for the zoological reference. Each small square is a glittering moment in the life of the creature on display. The gallery coped admirable with each and with works all sizes in between.

Nietzreba’s piece is a series of insect wings, much enlarged and laid down in silhouette on canvas and transparent acrylic sheet. In some mysterious way she invokes flight in the context of the cruelty evoked by dead and detached wings. Almost an almost authoritarian banner the piece dominates the entrance to the gallery.

Nietzreba uses insect wings in most of her work. In Flesh of our Flesh she conjures up the outline of a torso of a little dancer suspended on tulle with strong light playing on it to cast shadow behind. Once again the image is caught between layers of light moments of being. The vulnerable and the cruel are incorporated in the silhouette, wedged between moments, elegance and sadism brought together in strange sensual beauty.

Two works Veil 14l and veil 14r, perhaps a diptych take this process to the limit. Two mildly erotic images are over-layered with so many layer sof translucent white fabric that the whole thing looks solid, the image like a fly in very cloudy amber. Perhaps Nietzreba is interested in the way we cocoon moments of extreme pain and pleasure, nurture forgetting to a fine point of subdued pleasure

Lesley Smith’ works with recycled materials to produce an analogue to landscape and geological process the decay of human artefacts in the face of the endless dissolution of the natural world enjoyed the ancient pale green paint and the crusty timber scrammed in the pictorial plane of equation. As for Robert Cleworth he has always been a consummate tonal painter in the manner of Tom Roberts who must surely be one of his heroes. He ha snow reached the point of making impeccable small self-portraits where his head has an intense presence that appears almost automatically from a precisely judged collision of cultivated patches of paint. The existential moment in painting always appears at the moment when image and paint part company as in Torso. Cleworth is past master at making this happen

This show comes highly recommended. Try to catch it before 30th of August.

David Brown's A Death in the Family, KURB gallery until 13 August

This is barely a review since I am director of the KURB and a good friend of the reclusive Brown.

This is a show of abandoned paintings, work that may never be finished because of the complexity of their ambition. So far admirers of these unique works include the nude dancer from next door and the distinguished painter John Cullinane.

Don't miss them.

Drinks Saturday 8 August from 2.00 pm, social at 5.00pm

As Brown puts it:

In a sense, every painting is abandoned at some point in its progress.

The gloss soon wears off paintings whose artists have contrived to give the impression of completion, largely because this can only be achieved by pretending that most things do not exist. Nonetheless our ‘art -oving’ bourgeois, love this kind of corrupt failure to death because their entire lives are about eliminating most things from experience; violence death, crime, desperation, homelessness and exploitation do not figure in the art they favour. Boredom, languor, indifference and being ‘nice’ are always the thing.

These paintings, including the non-figurative pieces, all aim for excess. There is always more to be done to each of them. I am for the kind of anti-bourgeois excess to be found the paintings of William Hogarth or the full page drawings in vintage Beano annuals. Give me excess of it!

Each painting has a theme and an source. A Death in the Family is a transposition of a coptic funeral ritual as described by Lawrence Durrell into a western suburbs tilt slab mansion.

A death in the family

Heritage Dimensions: Sculpture and Concept Drawings by Graham Heritage until 23 August.

Phillip Berry, Metropolis and other stories at Elements Gallery until 29 August.

Gallery East, adventurous as ever, is introducing another new artist, Graham Heritage, who is fascinated by machines,and mechanisms, and has a special take on the way they model our lives and memories.

Like many of my generation I owned a donkey engine as boy. This was a small well-engineered, brass and enamel working miniature of an early steam engine, the very stuff of the industrial revolution. Clever boys connected their engines to various models from windmills and generators to looms. I enjoyed lubricating the piston, lighting the meths lamps, brewing up the boiler, and just watching the fly wheel rotate in regular, well-governed revolutions.

It was the open display of each function of the machine that fascinated me, not its potential function as a source of energy for other purposes. Heritage has taken this intensely engaged condition of the imagination as an entry point for his art work.

Several works take the form of large open pedestals. On top of each one is a specialised machine space laid out with the same intensely functional concern as my childhood donkey engine. One, Boiler Room almost gives the show away. It looks like a complex steam generator laid out in a manner not unlike one of O’Connor’s pump rooms for the Kalgoorlie pipeline, including the carefully painted brickwork.

Some misguided theorists might argue that Heritage is a prisoner of an outmoded modernity, that machine logic has no place in post-modern creation. Experiment Gone Wrong presents a heap of organic parts, well-observed offal. There are shades of the lab in the 1930s version of Frankenstein but there is more to this relationship than a guts versus gears modernist analogy. The question of what it is to be human goes far beyond the petty careerism that sees its future in declaring that all concerns that predate 9/11 are irrelevant.

Consider Examination Room, a selection of white machines suggestive of an MRI suite, posed on a black-and-white check floor. The red crosses in circles that adorn this apparatus are specially interesting, all health, all caring. Behind the machines however is a grid of black framed photos referencing the wider aspects of ‘examination’. There are whale skeletons from a museum, neck vertebrae, some details of mysterious mechanisms. This technology is indisputably present in the here and now, but the desire to observe, to know, to watch things working transcends silly modern/post modern dilemmas.

Heritage can link all these ideas to his down home model making. The hand-made aspect, the feel of these models reminds us that there is something easily accessible to the universal imagination in the most complex and esoteric of donkey engines. The fascination it invokes has not changed over time, whether modern or post modern. Amongst the model vehicles in this show is Truck Trailer, an ensemble which can be taken apart to show that the trailer contains an elaborate generator set, or least a set of parts, that might be a generator set, in line, an alien turbine or the parts of early model hydrogen bomb. There are no limits to way the imagination can appropriate mechanism to its own purposes.

Back in town Turner Galleries presents three mid-career painters each of whom works in what is now the highly familiar system associated with the relatively large scale abstraction that originated with the reaction of Australian artists to the New York school in the 70s and 80s. The spirit of Rothko and Stella hovers over these works, Their real progenitors, however, are the younger Michael Johnson, Brian Blanchflower, John Peart, and Syd Ball, which is to say that an Australian need for pleasing decorum, even for disciplined decor, is playing a far greater role in their work than any of them would likely admit. This not to say that their work is simply a pale unresolved imitation. On the contrary, all three have original things to contribute to our enjoyment of this genre.

Lisa Wolfgramm’s Pulse consists mainly of metre-square paintings filled with narrow vertical stripes of paint in a slightly complex sequence of acid colours. The colours form chords like the designs on old fashioned deck chair canvas but infinitely more complicated.

One wonders if Wolfgramm selected her colours by pure intuition or perhaps by some aesthetic version of DNA sequencing, a random art making similar to the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly that were to lead on to assemblage and Sol Lewitt.

Wolfgramm applied the paint fairly liquid, in some works solid drips have formed on the outer face of the bottom stretcher. She has also left the irresolute stripes with sideways shifts where her control has wavered slightly thus introducing another dimension of extra-painterly significance — the lyrical limits of the hand made. If you look hard enough you can find a similar lyricism in Stella’s early painting that frames up his reductive logic. Taken together Wolfgramm’s various acceptances of the material nature of paint provoke a tremendously sensual surprising engagement with the surface of each canvas

Serena McLauchlan’s Ink and Air, by contrast, sets out to dissolve the paint and canvas in the carefully controlled phenomenon of the flow and stain of liquid (acrylic not ink) across the surface. One event, one apparent moment, dominates each canvas, one stain, one smear evolved from Rothko, out of early Blanchflower. McLauchlan, however, is a miniaturist compared to them. Only one work, Tarnish, approaches a square metre; most such as the eloquent Lichen, are around a quarter of that. This gestural diminuendo is McLauchlan’s unique contribution to the long evolution of the genre of stain painting. It transforms the dynamics of an open gesture into a carefully contrived icon, a meadow into a manicured lawn. This kind of painting is not transparently immediate, but the result of a long process of adjustment. McLauchlan’s use of a small scale format openly doubles this phenomenon for the viewer, static dynamism, a frozen flow is her ultimate aim. When she succeeds, as she usually does, the result is delightful.

Despite the wise words and big names from big theory in the pamphlet that accompanies his New Work, I remain adamant that Trevor Richards is for the most part a joker. Certainly he is a subtle joker but his relation to the rhetorical forms of modern painting from Rodchenko and Rietveld to Rothko and even Rauschenberg has always been a bit of an intimidating piss-take, an ironic stand off, to which we can add, nowadays, a perfectly polished pastiche. Indeed the surprise of his show is that it is so exquisitely wrought.

One can see his sense of humour clearly in Workout (2008), where broad stripes of scarlet, sky-blue, lemon-yellow and black are bent over, across and under each other, origami-like, always at the same angles, in four logically related panels. Yes we can work it out. In Turner Galleries at least, help is at hand. One of his small painted aluminium maquettes, stationed in front of the four panels as a 3D key to their delusory illusion, mocks their tendency to inflated rhetorical grandeur. ‘A little thing but mine own’ might well be Richards’ motto. There is much enjoyable work in this show but it is all spun out from a couple of very familiar ideas.

Meanwhile at Elements Gallery Dalkeith, Phillip Berry’s Metropolis and other Stories takes up the artist’s development as a country-based painter who retains the vision and desires of a townie. Development is the key to Berry’s ever more painterly response to the sociable human presence in landscape and townscape. His work has been a consistent intense engagement with that presence for almost three decades. I have long admired his determination and his ability to persist with a single image as it evolves through many layers of paint, so it was a pleasure to finally meet him when I opened his exhibition last Saturday.

Berry’s rigorously over-worked paintings, with their aggregations of colour and discrete tones remind me of a number of early romantic artists in Britain, notably Linnell. They too accumulated impasto and semi-impasto paint-marks over a long period of direct observation, each mark a note or an incident in a long drawn out process of looking.

The Conversation is a view over dunes to distant group of two women and girl on a beach before a complex sea surface made up of turquoise ultramarine and a stunning variety of greys and whites. The women are joined by the artist’s family dog, far away but still recognisable. Their blue and and red costumes work like enamels locked into the rolling waves.

This effect of complete integration is achieved directly through paint and the process of looking and putting down what one sees — red brown tones in the sand grass and luminous magenta hints in brooding grey clouds. Yet as his image of family clustered before fields or his amazing sequence of bush paintings shows Berry’s vision is poetic, always looking for the possibility of a story, the trace of human events.

A Biennale is normally understood as an expensive, international exhibition, an exercise in setting the pace for the local art scene. A local Biennale in a regional gallery might be expected to be faintly ridiculous, perhaps even a sign of provincial stupidity. Yet the Bunbury Biennale put together by Tony Geddes, Director of the Bunbury Art Galleries was none of these things. Indeed it was a pacesetter for the West just as powerful in its own way as Sydney's arty megathon.

So, in its sixteenth year, is the Biennale still a pacesetter for the West? Not in the same sense perhaps. In fact it presents a moderately conservative view of current Western Australian art, safe, steady, almost totally object based and often a little retardataire. Nonetheless it remains, scandalously, the only regular review of contemporary art in our State.

In his opening speech Stefano Carboni, the Director of the State Gallery, made a joke that his home town Venice has had a slightly larger Biennale for some time. Yes, but why has AGWA not introduced a regular WA Review, a State Biennial of its own? It had at least a decade of the greatest boom in history to make a start, so what went wrong? This outrageous laziness is not yet Dr Carboni’s responsibility, but it soon will be. Perhaps now is the time to take on the task; the lamentable PICA will never do it, despite its over-optimistic acronym.

Meanwhile, conservative Bunbury is doing well. Anyone who would like a ground level introduction to many of the concerns of our artists could do no better than a day trip. The coffee is good and there is one of the best fish and chip shops in Australia half hidden on a side street. In 1993, I thought the best painting in the show was Indra Geidans’ Cucina, one of her animal portraits. Geidans is in the current show with the excellent Taking the Strain, a view from below of a faceless female figure in a pink frock straining on a rope which disappears down to the horizon. This ‘metaphor for our human need to refine and balance our existence’ shows that Geidans herself has refined her approach over the intervening decade and a half. There is something Soviet, a hint of late Goya about her current, stripped-down, magisterial monumentality.

Sculpture was a big deal in the first Biennale; this year it’s back to its usual subordinate role. Extinction Series I, 2, 3. by local Michael Wise consists of three aluminium wall panels each with a grid of circular roundels coloured by the purposive disintegration of mass produced object to produce colour transfer. This is an interesting process, but the ultimate result is too much an extension of constructivism, Naum Gabo meets Victor Vasarely. On the other hand, in Tracing the Steps of the Last Day, a project exhibition running concurrently with the Biennale, Wise investigates the possibility that we are preparing our own extinction. As it happens his use of photo transfers of portrait heads into natural objects and glass suggests the absolute interdependence of humanity and the ‘natural’. It is only in his movie with its unfolding overlapping imagery of micro landscapes and green nature that the paradox of human presence and potential absence emerged. It reminded me of Ballard’s early novels such as The Drowned World and the automatically painted landscapes of the surrealist Max Ernst.

Jon Denaro’s Canopy, a pattern of yellow painted, shaped aluminium panels held up by a net of welding rods showed that the Whitechapel school aesthetic still has a long way to go. Anthony Caro never thought of fallen gum leaves, but as Denaro shows, they inspire absorbing sculptural forms. Denaro’s work was way beyond the pale pastel structures and dangling nests of silver wire that passed for sculpture elsewhere in the show. They were of course painting and drawing, strung out and moving around very quickly to acquire the prestige of volume.

The exception was Thomas Heidt’s fascinating Momentary Glimpse, a small cluster of black spheres made from charred timber supported by stainless steel rods. The artist works with ‘change and the constant flow of time.’ The American Pol Bury made similar objects, Clinamen in the sixties, but his were animated, very, very slowly so that you barely noticed.

By contrast, Mark Parfitt’s huge, improvised, skeletal, wooden cylinder, pine timbers, clamped together, linked to a wall of diagrams and notes attempts a similar provisional work, but he places his bets on the resilience of architecture and engineering, a half-completed building, ruined mining machinery still shaped for its purpose. Picabia did it better, and with a sense of humour. Marina Troitsky’s Phases of Meaning uses digital projection and found objects to achieve a far more engaging account of the complexity of relationship to things of all kinds from notes to natural residue. Her eloquent, poetic museum of memory is far more difficult to achieve than a first glance might suggest.

Painting dominates the show, and large painting at that, another sign of the desire for an undemanding, conservative look. Ron Nyisztor’s highly entertaining Comfort of Stone, Inner discussions, is a huge painting featuring a compound brick that the artist found and photographed near Eucla, in 1979, a reminiscence of the telegraph station. His interest in baked clay, stone and other minerals deployed for human use goes back a few years. The real challenge is the articulation of their forms and textures in patterns of soft, liquid paint. In this work, Nyisztor’s sense of the complexity of mineral form has finally reached the level of precise observation needed for his poetic ambition.

It is a strange thing to find one’s own work embedded in art much like Nyisztor’s minerals. In Ephemera, Jànis Nedéla has transcribed conversations about his work on twenty carefully coloured panels assembled into an abstract sunset. Spoken words, text, and visual representation merge into an ever-expanding memory of an attempt to engage his work by words alone. It is fascinating that a project of this kind can produce such a powerful icon.

Tony Windberg is one of the few artists to tackle the contradiction of painting as representation, as contrived image and as icon and irreducible substance. His ribbon-like assemblage of textures and tones, Peripheral – Rise and Fall suggests both the sensation, the shifting scales of a landscape and its textures, and a partial glimpse of a totally integrated abstract structure, the long lost order of nature in the eyes of humanity.

After a cibachrome-led boom about a decade ago, the use of photography by artists is in decline, but the Biennale has several examples of artists engaged with photography, such as Olga Cironis’ detached bird wing. Christopher Young is, however, the only artist to take on fully the idea of photography as process and art. He is fascinated by abandoned buildings and their contents, a kind of postmodern Pompei, in which broken furniture, sun-bleached curtains, useless files, fire extinguishers and floors covered with human detritus tell the tale of existence through trivial tokens. Through his work he asks, ‘What or who is there? What can’t we see? How do we overcome the helplessness of not being able to ground an image in a timeline?‘ These questions find an echo in the work and words of many artists in the Biennale. Perhaps, after all, it is a good summation of the dilemmas of our contemporary artists.

Brown Art Consultants

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