Chris Casali

Blue Note    1 January – 4 February 2023

 More on the artist

This isn’t what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT.

She broke the news gently in an email – “I was in two minds…what to show …. I have been developing new work alongside my watercolours and thought to show a painting …Like most of my work it's abstract with hints to the land…Is it a problem…I've never shown work like this before… Hmmmm just not sure that's all and thought to write.”

Not being sure might be the prevailing state of mind for an artist. If so, becoming sure would be their aim and working out what they can be sure of would be what they do. In conversation Chris described it as her process, that is how she goes about making a painting. “It’s a slow revelation of detail that causes the work to be always giving and not predictable” is how she put it.

There are romantic edges to Chris’s process. She described travelling with friends through the Australian desert, of making paintings on the ground and drying them in the branches of trees. But mainly it happens for Chris in her studio. A room, like most other studios, more or less empty and away from most other things where a kind of meditation begins. One thing leads to another, which often enough seems to be an act of desperation. Because like a caged animal, artists will try anything, take any risk to realise their work, in a bid for freedom that remains nothing more than a half-glimpsed possibility.

And so it might be with Chris’s painting. A single sweeping gesture poured over a deftly crafted canvas that hints at details drawn in the landscape. Is this a rock pool with a crest of foam left as the tide recedes?  Or a kind of Xray of the desert she recently visited? A landscape perversely sculpted by water – driven by the same gravity that dictates the flows and splashes of Chris’s paint, applied in hope of realising sureness. It is however, whatever you see it as.

But how does Chris see it? – exactly as you see it here. Not the step before, or the step after that she might have taken next – it is this step that she is sure of. The watercolour on paper that became an acrylic painting on canvas that replaced her planed exhibit in a process, where possibilities are examined without predigest, is of course exactly what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT. This is the summation of her process.

Tony Twigg

                                                                                                                            

Julie Green

6 June - 4 July     Two drawings 2018/2019  

Julie Green is not big. If you were to meet her you would likely think of her as a petite woman. Who’s eyes begin to sparkle as she describes a life that is anything but small.

From high school in the eastern suburbs to art school with time off in New York to study tap dancing and textile design. The bands, the galleries, on to Europe back to Sydney, finish art school to find a job working for Ray Hughes in his art gallery that simultaneously celebrated artistic endeavor and defied categorization. She went on to work in a bookstore before travelling across Canada’s subarctic tundra with Louis Nowra and Vincent Ward researching Ward’s epic film Map of the Human Heart. Back in Sydney she opened her own gallery, which for her became a meditation on verbal and nonverbal expression. There was an M.A. in art therapy and then in 2000 study at Charlie Sheard’s studio school that “made the bottom fall out of my taste bucket”. Since then she has been working in community art and of course painting and drawing.

Standing in front of Julie’s two drawings, it’s their size and the scale of her marks that is arresting. It’s big and Julie explains, “after 20 years of sero-negative arthritis a new biological drug treatment Humira gave me back my body”. That was a couple of years ago when Trump was in power and Sydney gasped under a blanket of smoke. Julie’s “fucked-up American flag” and heroically defiant tree are swathed in a celebration of mark making that revels in her new found freedom. She explained that she lay on the paper sheets first stretching toe to finger to mark her scale on the drawing. It follows that the arc of her drawn line is the arc of her reach. In this way Julie observes the idea that expressionist art is the physical measure of the artist while a reading of it’s subject is a measure of the observer’s intellect.

It might be a long bow to draw but in an art work there is a marriage between the artist and the viewer. Each arriving at roughly the same spot from different directions. For a moment caught in a single image before departing on divergent paths, each carrying perhaps, for a while at least some echo of their shared meditation. And so it is with Julie’s drawings.

Tony Twigg

Andrew Leslie

08 March - 11 April      Mirror, number 20

Link to artist's website

Like the work of many artists, Andrew Leslie’s art can be read in the context of art history or seen as the function of a lifetime.

His life began in Geelong. Moved to New York State, Sydney and Melbourne, to Wellington, back to Melbourne. Around 1973 he moved into a share house in Carlton with some art students, completed a Science Degree then enrolled at Caulfield Teck to study printmaking. After a brief stint in Bendigo he landed a job teaching printmaking in Perth at Curtin University where he noticed that his art was to do with “transfer and repetition”. Suddenly - it is easy to imagine each part of this work as a printing plate kissing its image on to the wall in softly reflected light. Given the title Mirror, number 20 you might consider the work an elaboration of a printing process and even wonder if it's the object, its reflection or the process involved that is the subject of the art work. 

In 2002 Andrew followed his partner to Sydney where he found work, teaching printmaking at the Sydney College of the Arts and began showing with Annandale Galleries. Then in 2003 he met Billy Gruner and within the space of a conversation decided to set up a gallery, the long-running SNO – Sydney Non-objective. “Non-objective” is art historical jargon that the Tate Gallery defines as – “a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity”, which perfectly describes Andrew Leslie's work Mirror, number 20. A definition of  “an objective view” however, “is one that focuses on the object's physical characteristics as the main source of information”, which equally describes Andrew’s work and non-objective art more generally.

Here Andrew identifies a dichotomy faced in art, as it was across the 20th century by humanity and the idea of spirituality. This art, which ruthlessly avoids being anything other than what it literally is, articulates a deep sense of spirituality, of other worldliness. This non-objective art, born in Russia immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution and again mid century in New York City at the ascendency of Modern Capitalism, was born of godless times. Yet it offers a mirror, as Andrew Leslie’s work most eloquently does to spirituality, not of religious or political codification but of the individual. The spirit here is yours, you brought it with you and you will take it away with you.

- Tony Twigg

Tony Twigg

15th September - 19th October     The Idea of Subject
Link to website with artist information

Usually a picture is of something. It might be a picture of a person, or a building or a landscape. Early on the idea of a picture’s subject was complicated by religious art. For example the subject might be a person, Christ who is not a particular man but a symbol of people’s humanity, or a building, the Kaaba, which is not a building shrouded in black cloth but the essence of Islam. And in Sydney we have our own wrapped thing, the landscape at Little Bay packaged by Christo as an altar to our cult of contemporary art. We keep these images in our memories where they cease to be pictures of particular things and become symbols that stand for all we know about a particular thing.

The picture then is not of something, but is a something that has been invented. Often fashioned along strict guidelines set down by culture permitting our pictures to be read by others as language. For some a stick is a stick is a stick while for others a stick is a tree is a magic wand. However in either case the subject is made and then remade each time it is read, eventually becoming, a sort of mirror reflecting our understanding or lack of it, of the self, the enduring subject of all art.

I have come to think of this as the method of making or inventing art. It is the experience through time of making and remaking a single thing that automatically changes each time it is made. For example, the constructed work here was made in 1989, remade in 1997 and remade again in 2016. The process was articulated metaphorically, codified as language and identified as myth. Evolving in this manner it could eventually be reduced to pattern. There are precedents in art making of legible matters, for example the crosshatching or rarrking in Aboriginal bark painting and the geometrical arabesque arrangements of polygons in Islamic art and architecture. My drawings are of similar patterns. And if this constructed work could be seen as a figure, each drawing would be seen as a portrait or more correctly a visage, an expressions caught in ripples of time connecting the past with the future that are stretched, teased out and exposed across a present that is our now.

- Tony Twigg

Melbourne Aquino

22 October - 11th November           Pinoy Cubism

 

Melbourne Aquino’s painting is derived from the urban environment of Manila, which it’s self is the basis of the Filipino understanding of Cubism. Historically described as Barong Barong this kind of painting draws a graphic parallel between the shanties of the city and the faceted surfaces of cubist paintings. More importantly there is a dialogue between the constructive inventiveness brought to found objects by Cubism and the inventiveness of necessity applied to the traditional Filipino Balai or house re-interpreted with available or found materials in the urban environment. Aquino’s paintings that obviously refer to overlaid and torn posters connect this intuitive cognizance of Cubism to the arresting beauty of dilapidation that is the patina of Manila.

Melbourne Aquino. D CV2 VIVA-13.

I came across Aquino’s painting in a group exhibition at the Astra Gallery in Makati, Metro Manila. When I made the obvious association with torn posters he was quick to point out that his work is all paint. Then looking closely at the works I realized that I was observing a mode of painting rather than the representation of an image.  These graphically alert paintings hover at an edge, between representation and process, between what we know and what we assume we know. They are beguiling in their beauty and instinctively honest abstract paintings.

There was treat waiting for me when I mentioned to Aquino that I’d like to see more of his work. Quietly he handed me an iPhone and I started swiping. I collected a cold beer, found a quiet corner and went on swiping, and then swiped some more.

Melbourne Aquino. B CV2 VIVA-7.

Melbourne Aquino. C CV2 VIVA-12

I wasn’t looking at two paintings by a young artist in a group exhibition. I was looking at years of intently focused engagement with a process and an image that had been explored with meticulous, detailed observations. Like artists before him, Aquino has laid claim to his imagery. These are not paintings of torn posters; they are of torn posters reminiscent of Melbourne Aquino’s paintings.

-Tony Twigg