George Alexander

11 June - 9 July      Naked Lunch    

More on the artist

George Alexander’s piece, Naked Lunch is an artefact of Covid 19. It is an exercise in idleness, in diversion and perhaps futility - a hiatus engendered by the obliquity two-week quarantine that temporally isolated Australia from the pandemic.

George and his son Blaze had returned from Europe, lucky to have found the flight that landed them in suite L2U6 of a Haymarket hotel where their day had 3 important highlights, the delivery of breakfast, lunch and dinner. All presented in plain paper bags left anonymously outside their door. The artist in George began sketching images on them lifted from the films he was watching on his phone. He would freeze a frame, render it on a bag, and then, presumably recommence his wait for the next meal. I’m not sure if it was a pre-meditated work of art or one that casually evolved but now each bag is identified – “Quarantine series George Alexander paper bag 32 x 30 cm” - it’s become a sort of haphazard diary and a work that contemplates the process of waiting.

Waiting, across the casual accumulation of time through the disconnected moments of forgotten considerations. We all know this, we have all waited for a bus in an outer suburb and know the interminable passage of idle thoughts, ever vigilant for a bus, lest it be missed. It is realised here in George’s work. Stretched out across the floor. Opened up as segmented and disconnected units where the “meat” for living has been replaced  with  the   thoughts of “existing”. 

And we have all known the pleasure of idleness. The suspension of need and responsibility in a careless void where dancing images flash behind our eyelids while our thoughts slide across the past and an imagined future with equal ease. Here is a record for that euphoria - drawn by George Alexander while he waited to take on again the burdensome mantle of self-responsibility.  It’s hard to think of another moment when so many people were given the opportunity to ponder metaphysics in such comfortable circumstances. And while it is rare to come across visual art made in these circumstances for obvious reasons I wonder what pottery and prose was generated during those various and many two weeks. They, along with George’s drawing are the artefacts of a glorious, luxurious, meditative moment in our collective rather than personal history.   

Tony Twigg