Space
August 2012
Paul Klee’s commitment to abstract paintings demonstrates the desire of early 20th century artists to visually express their emotional rather than literal responses to the world around them. Line, colour and form became an abbreviated, symbolic language through which ‘the rhythm of a man’s walk, breath, heartbeat… the cosmic rhythms of day and night, of year succeeding year, of the moon in relation to the earth’ could now be implied.
Notions of space are capable of traversing a variety of realms. Expressed through its relationship to the body or the lived environment around it, space can be understood, felt and logically located with the relative surety of reality. Within the plane of a two dimensional image, space becomes an abstracted concept in which a sense of depth, perspective or distance is achieved through the use of illusion. Warping the pictorial implications of space enables artists to enhance the dynamic of an idea by offering multiple perspectives of an experience. In essence such images are ‘not concerned with the way the artist sees the world but with the sensations’ associated with the act of looking.
The impulse to represent the metaphysical possibilities of an environment, beyond the fixed or neatly understood, led French born artist Christophe Stibio to immerse himself in the vast and silent landscapes of the Australian desert. Through a painstaking process the artist pieces together small torn and cut sections of paper to map out a new topography of space, laced with personal longing. The resulting abstract forms and colours suggest a distorted, distant realm that shimmers with endless, complex spatial problems. As memories become embedded within the fragmented shadows of colour, geographic truth collapses. The landscape becomes one of the mind rather than any physical reality.
Collapsing, expanding and fragmenting a given site to affect a set of physical responses in the viewer has been exploited by artists since the invention of perspective. Creating unstable visual grounds forces a rupture between the known and the assumed. The illusionistic quality of much of Richard Blackwell’s work ‘activates the mind to consider the transformation of the object from the physical to the virtual and back again.’ Responding to architectonic forms and urban design principles Blackwell combines the disciplines of drawing and sculpture to suggest warped perspectives, complex vanishing points and linear convergences found within the built environment. Oscillating between the physical and the represented, Blackwell’s virtual spaces exploit notions of accessible and impenetrable space, creating a kind of playful optical banter with the viewer.
Also working with the quality of line to suggest illusionary depth, Agneta Ekholm’s seductive paint surfaces operate in the margins between tactile fact and immaterial possibilities. The trace of the artist’s hand, moving in slow and fluid order, lays down translucent ribbons of colour. As the luminosity of individual colours shift and slide against one another, light and dark begin to create new, internal space within the canvas. Like looking through the frozen sheet of an icy river, movement within gently carves its own trajectory out of the stillness.
Central to Charlie Sheard’s dynamic abstract works is the tactile reality of paint itself. The spaces depicted are those of the canvas, the physical impact of materials on that surface and the relationship between the body and the pictorial frame. These works allow paint to move under the force of gravity, to drip and pool in response to the tilt of the canvas, or in keeping with the dynamic motion of the hand. Representing a desire to activate and experiment with the sensation of movement and colour, these works are also maps of the mind, each element reflecting the thoughts and emotions of the artist, be they outbursts of excitement or the explosion of new thought.
The space between image and object is blurred in the sculptural paintings of Terri Brooks. In many ways a flâneur, Brooks absorbs the physical qualities of the built environment, delighting in the accidental textures and material surfaces of concrete, building materials or bitumen roads. She is not a landscape painter, but works to reflect the truth and beauty of the utilitarian surfaces around her. Her canvases offer a sort of spatial dislocation or inverse trompe-l’œil of reality, as isolated sections of the everyday are reborn within the gallery setting. As replicas of the factual world, in all its decay and innate ordinariness, these paintings subvert the idiom of preciousness and make the certain uncertain.
A lived, momentary experience of space is articulated in Dion Horstmans’ highly strategic sculptures. Fascinated with delineations of open space and implied movement, these works operate on both physical and implied levels. Stretching out to cover multiple points in space, their iron frameworks elicit ideas of architectural elevations, flight trajectories and the temporal pull of line and distance. From the implied movement housed within the static form comes a secondary dimension, as light plays amongst the armatures and voids. Imbued with a sense of freedom and action the resulting shadows shift ideas of projection into action. Working with the fall of light to produce a kinetic reflexivity, Horstmans’ sculptures recall the style and function of a sundial. Time and space at last operating within one form.
Sitting partway between the definitive and the meditative, Jo Davenport’s practice depicts both the physical truth of a landscape and the suggestive, subjective experience such spaces can evoke. A sense of immediacy drives the fluid and gestural quality of her mark making. As natural forms morph with a painterly, almost expressionistic concern for colour and composition, her drips and spills translate the observed qualities of rivers in flow, the sway of foliage in wind and the changing colours of light. Space and the experience of it becomes a multi-layered, translucent experience, devoid of definitive boundaries.
Space shows at Flinders Lane Gallery until August 18
Images:
Moonfire Fragments #3 2012 Powdercoated steel.
Beneath the Surface, 2012 Diptych oil on Belgian linen & mixed media on voile.
Abstraction, Space #3 2012, mixed media on linen .
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