Painting’s renaissance period
A new exhibition reflects the resurrection of the ‘‘series painter’’,
The title of Gareth Brighton’s and Thomas Hancock’s exhibition, Considerably Less Stressful, could be referring to the status of painting and its longstanding relationship with contemporary art in the 21st century. As artists increasingly work between sculpture, photography, design or painting, it once again seems possible to be considered a serious painter in the contemporary art world.
Ironically, this may, in part be due to the global proliferation of digital images over the past decade, directing attention back to painting as an exacting and distinct means of representing and communicating an idea and our experiences.
Certainly, New York academic and art critic Barry Schwabsky is enthusiastically championing painting as an art form that it not going away. Schwabsky has drawn attention to the vitality of its presence in the serious art world and its potential to forever reinvent itself. He singles out a new generation of artists who understand the distinct nature of a painted image.
Their paintings may sometimes seem earnest or ‘‘skackerish’’, but their engagement with images, says Schwabsky ‘‘inevitably conveys an emotional stance’’.
He also maintains that painting is an art form that thrives because it continues to ‘‘eat its own head’’. That is, contemporary painting is shameless in admitting it brings a history with it that includes every painter who has come before them; from Giotto to Rembrandt and Picasso to Francis Bacon.
Contemporary painters make images about the making of images, acknowledging the conventions of painting and its histories, and also its particular ‘‘sense of reality’’.
In Considerably Less Stressful, Brighton’s and Hancock’s paintings seem conscious of such attitudes. Hancock’s recent photographic-realist paintings do not exist to reveal the detail of the material world. Instead, interest is centred on their potential as images capable of directing our attention to their unreality.
Undoubtedly, his meticulously detailed representation of wire forms, casting strident shadows across the surface of the picture plane, reveals a refreshing response to his choice of subjects and his interest in them.
Impressive as the accuracy of their form and materiality may seem, the objects he has observed and recorded persist in asking the question; ‘‘what exactly do I represent?’’ Or as Hancock puts it, ‘‘the image describes the painting. The painting does not describe the image.’’
Hancock sayshe has been working on this series for the past 18 months, and where previously he had limited himself to a particular type of object like say, a liquor bottle, ‘‘now I am concentrating on these wiry, tubular metal objects’’.
The paintings depict these objects in a way which obscures their identity. The objects are depicted figuratively; however the type of object and their viewpoint lend them an abstract quality’’.
The visual deceptions are entirely premeditated with their intentions evident even in the initial selection of objects.
‘‘I source them from secondhand stores, particularly those whose function is not easy to identify.
‘‘With a painting, we feel like we should know what we’re seeing, and there is a sense of de´ ja` vu, for both the figurative reading of these works and an abstract reading of the lines creating a twodimensional image. In looking at these paintings, there is something of a Rorschach blot test, and of Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method which makes us see or want to see images which are not there.’’
Brighton’s paintings similarly make references to the history of art, particularly Abstract Expressionism from the 1960s and Minimalism from the same decade. Yet, in their titles, he avoids historical expectations associated with such work.
Most immediately, Brighton’s paintings have more in common with contemporary painters like New York artists Joe Bradley and Stanley Whitney than Jackson Pollock or Mondrian.
Brighton says Whitney has been an artist of interest to him. ‘‘Whitney has reinvented the grid in abstract painting. His work is very expressive and holds true to being very much the work of a New York action-painter. They are quite messy and very vibrant paintings, but there is not the same psychological emotive content or the types of claims about them that were made about Abstract Expressionism.
‘‘Whitney’s paintings really do it for me; big bold colours and over the top. Greens that are very green and yellows that are undeniably yellow and he just keeps on building them up, layer upon layer until they find this kind of harmony.’’
Brighton also says that, like Bradley, his work maintains an association with the real world that is as important to his paintings as their abstract and formal properties.
This sense of fluctuating relationship and ways of reading Brighton’s paintings and their attention to the world in which we live is evident in his use of materials, the titles of his works and their experience as physical objects that give primary attention to the qualities of the painted image.
‘‘Crucifixion is painted on a shirt wrapped around a board, and most of the paintings are on old shirts. There is an economy to being an artist. You have to look at using and recycling whatever you can find. The main thing about using found-materials like board or cloth is, in some ways, it is like tying the work to a place and time, bringing it down from anywhere that might seem grand or ‘‘superlofty’’ and bringing it back to Earth.
‘‘Also, I wanted to be painting on to the top of something and for the paint to be attached to something. If you are looking at a painting and the canvas has been primed [with paint sitting within its surfaces], that allows you [a deception] to look into an illusionistic space.
‘‘I want them to be expressive painting marks, but I want them to be paintings that are not about a psychological space. Psychological is okay, but I did not want them to be over-emotive.’’
And what about the title of the painting: Trying not to think about the internet? ‘‘Although they are abstract paintings, I still want there to be a string to the kite. I don’t want them to fly away into some sort of ephemeral space. Every one of them is attached to this world and they are alluding to something.’’
"There is an economy to being an artist. You have to look at using and recycling whatever you can find."
Gareth Brighton
❚ Gareth Brighton and Thomas Hancock, Considerably Less Stressful is at Chambers Gallery, 241 Moorhouse Ave until February 24.