Arts Nexus

[Eve]

Out of the abstract

Non-figurative art has been with us for almost a century, but a new generation of artists seems no longer to believe in it. astian Smeeits some Melbourne galleries

The Australian
May 06, 2006

WHEN you compare the up-and-coming artists of today with those of 10 or 20 years ago, one of the things you notice is that few of them are embarking on careers as abstract painters. Painting in general may have been rejuvenated lately, but the movement is all in the direction of figuration, which is to say, representations of things in the world.
They may be representations based on second-hand things, such as photographs or signs; they may be rough and expressionistic or they may use pastiche, collage, conceptualism and various other clever ploys. But they are very unlikely to be purely abstract.

Even the best young painters who do still work in an abstract idiom - artists such as Brett McMahon from Newcastle, Melbourne's Stephen Bram or Canberra's Marie Hegarty - are not interested so much in "pure abstraction" (in the tradition of Kandinsky, Malevich and the American postwar abstractionists), as in spatial ambiguities, ambiguities that don't just take hold on the canvas but have been observed out in the world.

McMahon is inspired by industrial structures and signs, Bram is fascinated by architecture, while Hegarty is interested in the optical marvels of surface tension, double vision and magnification.

Why do young artists no longer believe in pure abstraction? There's a whole slew of reasons. But in essence, younger artists are terrified by the idea of art for art's sake. (What, after all, could be more indicative of dribbling, self-absorbed aestheticism than abstract painting?) Moreover, the rhetoric that accompanied modernist abstraction - rhetoric that ranged from an absurd belief that abstraction was the logical endpoint of art history to a conviction that it could function as a path to spiritual transcendence - no longer convinces them.

There's also the possibility that after almost a century of fervent exercises in abstract painting by thousands upon thousands of artists around the world, the language of abstraction has been all but exhausted. I have my doubts about this theory. Why, after all, should there be limits to the practice of making non-referential marks on canvas? But I do not doubt that it is getting more difficult for artists to carve out a genuinely original abstract vision.

And yet there remains a generation of senior Australian abstract painters with strong reputations and distinctive visions. One thinks, for example, of Brian Blanchflower, Sidney Ball, Geoffrey de Groen, John Firth-Smith and Ann Thomson. The Bucharest-born Aida Tomescu, whose latest show of paintings and works on paper just ended at Melbourne's Niagara Galleries, belongs to a generation between, and although she is greatly admired by people whose judgment I respect, her work suggests to me some of the weaknesses inherent in a certain kind of abstract painting, even when pursued with sincerity.

Her works on paper are brilliant: complex, tough, full of life and backbone, they never cease to keep the eye engaged and in motion. In the most recent of them, she combined the splintering effects and unexpected rhymes of collage with overlays of red graffiti and a wild array of black and white marks.

But Tomescu's paintings looked to me more and more like a grand manner with nowhere left to go. Upstairs at Niagara Galleries, one entered a room of glowing reds and yellows. The warm colours of the paint reflected off the polished wooden floor boards, creating an effulgent orange ambience. The overall effect was silencing, and rather impressive, like an abstract version of Chris Ofili's shrine-like The Upper Room, installed at Tate Britain in London. Sacred connotations are not, perhaps, beside the point. Tomescu's paintings set the dense materiality of thick paint in tension with glowing, immaterial colour in much the same way that Orthodox icons treat the sensuous and glowing surface image as a portal or gateway to the spiritual world. (Another artist from Romania, Constantin Brancusi, was profoundly inspired by his native tradition of iconography). The problem is that, while they may be impressive as a congregation of images installed in a well-lit room, Tomescu's paintings seem pasty and flaccid on their own.

The relationship between her surface forms and the rectangular supports feels arbitrary, as do the brushstrokes themselves. As a consequence the overall effect is inert. The layers and layers of paint beneath her final, brilliantly coloured surfaces can seem more like a self-conscious "sign" of gravitas than something integral to the success of the work.

Ultimately, I suspect, it is a question of belief. I do not doubt Tomescu's sincerity, but I cannot muster up the impulse to believe in these thickly painted but otherwise radically reduced works. In John Updike's curious 2001 novel, Seek My Face, he has a character loosely based on Lee Krasner, the abstract painter and widow of Jackson Pollock, tell a young interviewer from an online magazine: "Someone of your generation probably can't believe how crucial, how important, how huge painting seemed then. It hadn't been domesticated yet. It hadn't been put in its place, its page of the Living section, with a pat on its little fuzzy head." She is referring to the years in which Pollock made his best works. Later on, she says of the abstract expressionists: "they all still spoke of painting in terms of self-exploration and an agonized authenticity that would revolutionise the world and whatnot, but the results were a little like company logos, everybody working on the scale of 19th-century academic art but each of them having come up with some eye-catching simplification".

This is acute. The first statement reminds us of the force and conviction that underpinned abstract painting at its zenith; the second goes to the heart of why many people find it hard to engage with abstract painting today. Can we find it in ourselves to believe wholeheartedly in such paintings? Or do we see them more sceptically, as products of a certain time, a certain rather narrow set of assumptions, even a certain lack of imagination?

Whole oeuvres of recent art have been dedicated to this question, but you need look no further than the German artist Gerhard Richter, whose thoughts on the subject have been collected in publications with titles such as Doubt and Belief in Painting. I find Richter's vision (or lack of it: he has turned uncertainty and self-consciousness into a moribund manner of his own) rather desiccated, but he has made some exquisite paintings, and it's no exaggeration to say that he has been a bigger influence on the current generation of painters than any other artist alive.

Richter is winked at in a painting called Gerhard's Retreat by David Ralph at ARC One Gallery on Flinders Lane in central Melbourne. Ralph's show, easily the most compelling of a crop of painting exhibitions in Melbourne right now, is called Mobile Home, and it consists of a series of small figurative paintings that riff on the theme of caravans and other types of mobile home. It's an extremely sly, self-conscious show, and its real subject may simply be the strange business of representing things in paint.

Before now, Ralph, who was brought up in Melbourne and returned from studying in London 18 months ago, painted urban images in a beguiling but rather slick photo-realist mode, using a lot of blurred imagery suggestive of alienation in the manner of Richter. He has since switched to a more "painterly" approach; he's more interested, in other words, in manipulating paint to achieve effects that are unique to the medium, than in imitating photographic effects.

And yet his approach is full of wit and verve, dazzlingly alive to the tension between abstraction and figuration and packed with tautologies, art historical in-jokes and assumptions turned on their heads. In their combination of painterly wit and conceptual mischief-making, if not in their look, they are reminiscent of the work of brilliant young painter Matthias Weischer.

Why mobile homes? Ralph says in an artist's statement that he "needed a break from the smog and concrete" of the city. But he has chosen mobile homes, in truth, as a flexible metaphor - not only for displacement, but for a sense of being unanchored within art history. He paints, you feel, in the same way that someone might choose to live in a mobile home: hoping for adventure and an imaginative escape, unsure of where he belongs, lacking belief. Rather brilliantly, he turns all these symptoms into strengths. His small, modest paintings make us doubt our eyes. The objects in them are rendered in different degrees of illusionism, from trompe l'oeil to abstract blur. There are witty references throughout to artists such as Jeanne-Claude and Christo, Mike Nelson, Mario Merz and Richard Hamilton, but you do not need to get them to be drawn in. Ralph could push himself a lot further, but already he is one of the more interesting of a new generation of painters who make you optimistic about the medium's possibilities.

Optimism about painting is not, sadly, a feeling I get in front of the intensely fashionable works of David Wadelton. His show at Tolarno Galleries, also on Flinders Lane, is called Head-On and it consists of eight paintings of huge heads rendered in deep, saturated blues and reds, set against smaller flowers, pills, logos and so forth. The heads belong to young beautiful men and women with glowing, cyborg-like eyes and red, perfect lips, and they look like they should be on the cover of old books by Jay McInerney or Brett Easton Ellis. Very '80s. Everything about them tries to make you go "Ooooh", but along with the exhalation goes every inclination to keep looking.

Sutton Gallery in Fitzroy, meanwhile, has a more persuasive show of large-scale paintings by Stephen Bush called Heovelaken. A bit like Dale Frank, Bush pours luridly coloured paint straight onto his canvases and proceeds to push it around. Sometimes the results remain abstract; other times Bush helps the gloops and drips coalesce into mountain ranges or caves with stalactites. Overlaying these, without necessarily making the two elements cohere, he paints representational imagery, often in high-keyed monochrome.

In this show, Bush's dramatic abstract or mountainous grounds are overlaid with renderings of architecture, from timber huts to the Melbourne Arts Centre, the National Gallery of Victoria, and even scaffolding in the shape of Frank Lloyd Wright's famous building, Fallingwater, in Pennsylvania. These are fantastic, vibrant creations by someone with real flair for painting. But I found Bush's ideas a little fuzzy. The effect of juxtaposing his gloopy, almost psychedelic grounds with paintings of specific public buildings felt to me, rather than clever or intriguing, slightly concocted and arch.

It's a problem that besets many talented contemporary painters with conceptual ambitions: out of good manners and even admiration, you would love to know more; but then again, there is nothing in the paintings themselves to compel you.