9 May - 5 June Miss Universe 2011
Joe Frost's work; Miss Universe 2011 is offered as a compliment to his concurrent exhibition, Riders and Terrains, May 27 – June 19 at Liverpool St Gallery, 243A Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst.
This work, which possibly offers some historical context to Joe’s current show, could more exactly be titled Miss Universal. With her clear hand, her third eye and lumbering breasts she is more mother than candidate in a Miss Universe beauty pageant curated by the likes of Clive Palmer.
A T-shirt dropped on a chair salutes the masterfully painted figure. It’s the painter’s shirt - left as a parting gesture? Perhaps as a kind of flourish, like a signature indicating that the act of painting was concluded and that the painting is now finished? Joe commented that he could see something cosmic in a blue smear on the right hand side of the shirt hinting that it may indeed be the universe that gave rise to his loosely assembled “mother”.
With that simple gesture Joe proposes a dichotomy. The apparent spontaneity of his painting belies its deliberate consideration. The fact that his freshly brushed marks hang together with poise and calibration is no accident. It’s the product of long and deliberate manipulation, which sits in stark contrast to the paint-splattered shirt, which is accidental. There is a truth in the accidental application of paint that the painter attempts to emulate. It is free, expressed without inhibition or pretence. The paint is, as they say, permitted to be paint and sit, with our reference to illusion on the surface of the work. This is more than truth, this is the Modernist credo that Joe’s painting ardently aspires to and in my opinion achieves admirably.
The dichotomy Joe indicates can be stretched to the myth of an all-knowing figure born of a Cosmos that is blindly random, as blindly random as the markings on a painter's work shirt. It could be Botticelli’s clam shell giving birth to Joe’s Venus but it isn’t. It’s an artist schooled in the traditions of European religious art making a connection across centuries between the flat iconography of pre-Renaissance painting and the modernist iconography of now. And to know if this has any bearing on Joe’s current work you would need to visit his show at Liverpool St Gallery, 243A Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, 27 May – 19 June.
Tony Twigg
