What can be said visually?
Art Beat, Melbourne
Rebecca Jones (Five Walls Gallery, 1st Flr, 119 Hopkins St, Footscray, until Feb.28; www.fivewalls.com.au )
Julia Trybala (Station Gallery, 9 Ellis St, South Yarra, until Mar.14; www.stationgallery.com.au )
Daniel Hollier (Five Walls Gallery, 1st Flr, 119 Hopkins St, Footscray, until Feb.28; www.fivewalls.com.au )
Charcoal drawings on thick rag paper by Rebecca Jones standout in a group exhibit at Five Walls Gallery. Displayed in box frames, they show gridded up dark letters rubbed into that pulpy paper in a manner indebted to Jasper Johns. There is an immediate difference to his work. Johns ran off alphabet letters, or numerals, in repeating sequence across the canvas or sheet of paper. This was the visual equivalent of a droning voice endlessly repeating the alphabet sounds.
In contrast, Jones takes groups of words from song lyrics she has heard performed by women singers and musicians. One composition keeps repeating Just Having down the entire sheet of paper (illus. above), another piece spells out the statement Look what you made me do. They are not randomly chosen. Jones perceives in these glib seeming expressions something which throws a revealing light upon women’s outlooks and opportunities.
By coincidence, last week I reviewed a show by Nick Selenitsch who similarly painted blunt lines of text. Where Rebecca Jones takes groups of words heard and instantly comprehended, his works were prompted by not understanding conversations overheard, or signs seen, because they were in a foreign language. So if Selenitsch paints about absence of meaning, Jones crafts drawings about an excess in signification. Because, due to gender, she reads implicit messages carried in those casual phrases, with a second order of communication being conducted via the blunt verbal expression.
Each of these young artists also uses the visuality of their chosen text to signify what transpires with those phrases. Size, colour and typeface are manipulated by Selenitsch to suggest the obstruction of communication: ‘Message not understood’. On the other hand, Jones works each plain letter, rubbing away charcoal, then adding more, then rubbing the charcoal again in a relentless manner which gives her text an emphatic emotional weight: ‘I can hear you’.
This is pressed to the point where words will disappear into dense charcoal blackness with Look what you made me do. Pictorially how individual letters are arranged may recall Jasper Johns, but the selection and treatment of words has more in common with the American artist Mary Kelly who grapples with female identity, sexual politics and the visuality of handwriting. We see this in how by overdrawing the letters, rubbing away at the powdery charcoal until words are rendered illegible, Jones conveys the tension raised whenever ‘she’ hears ‘him’ uttering again Look what you made me do.
Labouring over individual letters in this way, Jones visualises emotional undertones to her chosen phrases. There is depth to this and creative intelligence. This young artist doesn’t yet have the technical proficiency of a Jasper Johns or a Frank Auerbach when handling charcoal-and-rag paper. But there is promise here, much promise.
Julia Trybala exhibits ultra-stylised paintings in bright hues of a lithe female figure. Her large exuberant canvases strive to be cheerfully erotic, but I find them most unsettling. An overtly sexualised young woman, often in vulnerable states of undress, is shown visually folded and squeezed into the rectangular canvas as if it were an imprisoning cage. Several pieces surely qualify as soft porn, and would not be out of place illustrating Fifty Shades of Gray.
Musing upon this show I keep returning to one question: how do viewers respond to such imagery in the wake of #MeToo, of Harvey Weinstein, of Jeffrey Epstein? It is not unreasonable to feel uncomfortable with pictures portraying women stripped, trapped and helpless. These reservations are just not answered by an impenetrable printed introduction which, equating obscurity with profundity, is the sort of document that gives art writing a bad name (‘Displaced and averted gazes complicate such an economy of attention,’ it tells me, adding ‘Reciprocal attention and desire mostly evade the viewer…’).
Still, Trybala’s efforts are saved—just—by her drawings, some pinned to the wall, others sitting on a desktop, all in the gallery’s office. Run off quickly in charcoal, they have an evident clumsiness, although here it is honest. Each shows a girl kneeling or sitting in an ungainly, very angular pose, sometimes naked. Unlike the paintings, there is nothing sensual, let alone erotic to these angled and taut schematic figures; nipples are like bolt-heads, and three of the roughly indicated faces have edgy expressions. These are the drawings of an artist aware that those similarly posed figures in the over stylized paintings are not at all enjoying what is happening.
Looking at the strongest two charcoals (one a self portrait), where a figure squats awkwardly to fit in the rectangular paper, it is as if the pose indicates how some women can feel forced into things. This is not prettiness: it is truth.
Daniel Hollier is the latest in those ‘lone wolf’ abstractionists who gravitate to Five Walls Gallery. Each of these solitary artists will have reasoned out an integrated visual program which has no connection with curatorial agendas or contemporary trends. They then employ this formula to produce what are often calm and soothing paintings steeped in a personal approach to colour and geometry.
Using airbrush, ruler and compass, Hollier offers viewers eye-catching rhythmic geometric compositions upon individually shaped canvases. At least one side of these supports will curve outward in a gentle arc, while similar visual curves appear in rhyming patterns within what are untextured acrylic configurations. Tracking across each painting, the eye readily reads off leisurely patterns in line and form; where every element in the individual piece, from painted composition to shaped canvas, uses the same circle intersected by a straight line.
Hollier steers his own course. Still, at least half the exhibits do echo the Synchromist abstractions of Roy de Meistre and Roland Wakelin, especially in their sequential colours and flowing shapes.
Discussion of this show would be incomplete without mention of the artist’s quite evocative titles. Most suggest phrases from nature poems: Mountains and water: A fish leaping runs one title, while another is Quiet leaves unbound and flying freely. These compositions both certainly perform as visual metaphors for what is indicated, whereas the sole landscape-based abstraction (illus. below) has been given the rather cryptic title People and things: A wrinkle in time.
