Vibrant Matter
May 2013
As both a pioneering abstract artist and a humble tradesman, Ralph Balson’s life was absorbed in the substance of paint.
Having left school at twelve years of age to begin work, his professional life as a housepainter over the ensuing decades involved the daily transformation of the interiors and exteriors of buildings in and around Sydney where he had emigrated from England in his early 20s. However, outside his working hours, this everyday, utilitarian application of paint was subsumed by a strong creative drive to experiment with this medium in an evolving series of paintings which sought to express through abstract compositions, his conception of the nature of the universe.
Poised on the cusp between the geometric assemblages of his Constructive Paintings and the painterly experiments in formlessness of his Non-Objective Paintings, in April 1955, just four months prior to his retirement at age 65, this by all accounts self-effacing and unassuming artist wrote the first of several ambitious pronouncements about how he perceived the role of abstract painting in contemporary life:
“It seems to me that today painting must dig deeper into the mystery and rhythm of the spectrum and that means existence of life itself. Not the age old form but the forces beyond the structure. Abstract, yes. Abstract from the surface, but more truly real with life.” (See Bruce Adams, Ralph Balson: A Retrospective, Melbourne: Heide Park and Art Gallery, 1989)
In this compelling statement, Balson distils what for many artists has been the allure of abstraction since its inception in the early 20th century. Liberated from the constraints of representation, of referencing the visible, objective world, abstract or ‘non-objective’ art has given artists a tremendous freedom to expand the possibilities of painting and sculpture to suggest, evoke, illuminate, and articulate whole new realms of experience and understanding that are inaccessible for figurative, mimetic art.
Drawing predominantly from the TarraWarra Museum of Art collection with selected loans, Vibrant Matter features paintings and sculptures from the past six decades by 35 Australian artists. The exhibition highlights the richness and diversity of abstraction during this period and attests to the myriad ways in which artists have sought to generate and instil meaning and feeling in their work through the wide variety of processes and handling of materials involved in their construction. Paradoxically, in foregrounding the materiality and the ‘facture’ of the artwork – its line, composition, tone, colour, texture and scale – abstraction induces contemplation of, and invites speculation on, the immaterial.
Through formal invention and experiments in process, inert matter, whether it be paint, bronze, steel or wood, is imbued by each artist with a sense of energy or presence, whereby the artwork comes to possess a vital materiality which transcends the physical, the exterior, and the visible world, to conjure the intangible, the interior and the invisible realms of metaphysical forces; hidden correspondences and rhythms; numinous experiences; and psychological transformation.
In this pursuit of the ineffable, non-objective art requires the abandonment of the precepts involved in comprehending representational art and, by initially sidestepping the deliberations and discernments of the conscious mind, directly engages our senses, our imagination and our emotions whereby, in the words of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: “… the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface”.
Vibrant Matter shows at TarraWarra Museum of Art until June 16.
Images:
1. John Coburn. Death and Transfiguration 1979.
2. Jon CATTAPAN, Absence Field III
3. Tony Tuckson. Untitled c.1962-65.
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