LAYERS OF TRUTH
Artist Andrew Taylor sheds new light on his complex approach to life and the modern world’s perception of the creative process
artist Andrew Taylor is in the throes of moving house. It’s a short shift around the corner from his current Melbourne address to a more salubrious street on St Kilda’s foreshore, but the transition is taking months. “You can’t expect an Edwardian to adapt to 21st-century manners in a minute,” says Taylor, adding that a 19th-century property had to be extended around the needs of three school-age children and two creative practices — one focusing on the movie productions of his wife, actor Rachel Griffiths. “I’m all for committing to labour and process. Sometimes, the slower the genesis, the grander the result.” It’s a refreshing attitude towards the act of creation in a culture that equates time with cost, but how to manage a long-term building program around the pressures of parenting, your wife’s peripatetic shooting schedule and a punishing international exhibition calendar without cracking it? Sitting within the stick-backed sweep of a Finn Juhl Peacock chair, the perennially chilled Taylor answers question with rhetorical question. “What does it mean to be fully engaged — to be open to what is being made and what is done? If you slow down the process and the thought until a specific moment, a specific decision lingers in a layer and you capture that capture, you can make things of presence that hold the present.”
Is this obtuse statement the legacy of living in Los Angeles, where Taylor recorded the “weird fecundity” of desert life for nigh on a decade while his wife fleshed it out on film? No, it’s an out-the-window observation of the inherently slow-build of new architecture — “pushed by a fast and furious process”. The comment makes sense of the canvases collecting in Taylor’s studio, a lofty space carved out of two rooms once used for entertaining. The paintings are unashamedly pretty windows on a natural world, the staggered impressions of which reach beyond the rhetoric into the recesses of memory — ‘lived’ time expressed in a dense layering of physical phenomena. Taylor knows how to seduce with an airy serenity that always sells out in shows. But his nature is not frozen by an orthodox classicism; it flickers on the peripheries of abstraction — the forest edges where nothing seemingly happens but the shadows bristle with small incidents. “They are about the things you look at, but ››
‹‹ don’t really see,” explains the artist, wondering what it is that compels us to view an image. “Painting must now compete with so many visual devices and so many different energies. How do you endow it with a presence that engages the viewer?” This line of questioning is being committed to pigment-etched, silver-nitrate mirrors, the colours of which fluoresce within old frames. “We are dealing with a new light cast by the backlit screens of computers,” says Taylor, elucidating on his cross-pollination of new-world luminosity and old-world effect. “If a tough present engages with a bespoke past can you reactivate a presence.” The answer ripples in mirrored surfaces that make a subject of the viewer — reflection varied with the tick of the clock. Time and tide wait for no man, but in these genius fluoro fields, where the future recedes as fast as the past, our mortality momentarily stalls in the mark. Pollination runs 23 March–10 April at Olsen Irwin gallery in Sydney; (02) 9327 3922; olsenirwin.com.