Frank Mesaric @ Latrobe Regional Art Gallery

Monday, 13 December 2010

Frank Mesaric: The Weight of Stone

We are used to absorbing the world around us at a single glance. We accept the incongruity of split images rushing past our eyes as we flick through glossy magazines, surf the ever-increasing number of television channels, or wade through the multitude of still and moving images on our computer screens. They compete with each other for our attention, and through the process of ocular attrition, we have learned to ignore this rapidly changing visual cacophony.

However, the new body of work by Frank Mesaric demands time and concentration. We need to leave the extraneous noise of the world at the gallery’s door, enter without rushing, take a deep breath, and abandon ourselves to contemplation. For it is only after careful consideration and inquisitive examination that semantic links between the seemingly disparate sets of images on the artist’s canvases begin to reveal themselves.

Mesaric’s immediate environment in Myrtlebank and the surrounding environs of Gippsland provide the artist with a continuous source of inspiration. Townships and power stations, hospitals, outhouses and derelict buildings are all drawn from the artist’s surroundings. Even the fighter jet and the burning oil field were witnessed by the artist not in the Middle East but from the comfort of his living room couch, which also makes its appearance in one of the paintings in this exhibition.

The Old Masters are another important source of Mesaric’s inspiration. Their ghosts were ubiquitous in the artist’s earlier subject paintings and portraits, whether through a gesture, symbol, or connotative presence. However, for the first time this influence is being emphatically brought to the fore. Quotations from Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velazquez, and others appear almost ephemerally, traced in a delicate shimmer of a white chinagraph.

Aesthetically and psychologically citizen of the world, yet physically and inextricably connected to Gippsland, Mesaric points out with these paintings that, in our global  egalitarian contemporaneity, everyone is as close to the renowned masterpieces of the world as they are to the nearest art book or computer screen. They posit Mesaric’s works somewhere between the celestial visions of saints in Old Master paintings and collaged social commentaries of James Rosenquist. They are metaphors for the higher aspirations of the artist and universal exemplars of achievements for his art students. More importantly, they are visual ‘thought bubbles’, providing running commentaries on Mesaric’s vignettes of contemporary life.

For example, the juxtaposition of the landscape with Loy Yang power station and Velazquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus could be read simultaneously as the celebration of earth’s bounty through his allegories of mining and viticulture; the critique of our culture of consumption through the depiction of the billowing power station and Bacchus’s feast; and the warning against the abuse of natural resources through his allusions to the prognosed environmental and climatic changes and the later depictions of the God of Wine as a dissipated and obese old man.

Multiple meanings similarly intertwine in Bridge at Tarraville and ‘The Virgin Mourning Christ’. Both images are those of quiet contemplation. At the same time, the sunset heralds the end of one day and foreshadows the beginning of another just like the death of Christ foreshadowed his resurrection. The empty road is lined with telegraph poles which are eerily reminiscent of crucifixes; and if we read the road as the site of fatalities, the image of the Virgin becomes a universal symbol of loss and mourning, and the overall message of the painting as that of rebirth, impermanence, and transcendence.

It is tempting to think that the painting Entry Door and ‘The Inspiration of Saint Matthew’ is self-referential. Opening your mind to inspiration is likened by the artist to leaving the door ajar and inviting that next step to the great unknown, the leap of faith, the feeling that Mesaric has experienced no doubt on numerous occasions when physically opening the door to his own studio or making that first brush mark on an empty canvas.

One can continue analysing these paintings ad infinitum. The Anatomy Lesson above a hospital bed is perhaps a simultaneous reference to the faith in the progress of science and the acceptance of the inevitability of death. Velazquez’s older gentleman next to the young boy in The Waterseller acquires menacing overtones placed beside the snapshot of a toilet with the imprints of sickness or blood. The eternal gender battle for domestic dominance is expressed subtly in phallic and vulvic indentations in the couch, and much more graphically in the quotation from Judith and Holofernes above.

At times the correlation between the corresponding images may appear to be tenuous, but the artist always leaves enough visual clues to engage the viewer in unlocking their hidden meanings, create parables of their own, and enrich their viewing experience in the process.

Frank Mesaric’s exhibition, The Weight of Stone, shows that his art is impossible to pigeon-hole. It does not slot easily into a convenient art movement, and cannot be branded with a fashionable ‘ism’. Yet it participates actively in the plurality of postmodernist vision which constitutes one of the cornerstones of contemporary Australian art, and engages the viewer in a discourse about the authorship, sense of place, and the universal aesthetic identity.

But in order to engage in this visual discourse with the artist, we need to leave the extraneous noise of the world at the gallery’s door, enter without rushing, take a deep breath and abandon ourselves to contemplation. I promise the experience will be a rewarding one, for we stand to learn infinitely more about these paintings, and, by osmosis, about ourselves.

http://www.frankmesaric.com/

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment.]

Recent Exhibitions @ Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

Dear Diary,

I spent the Queen’s Birthday weekend in a relative seclusion of Cowwarr – if one can call a sit down dinner for 40 a seclusion… However, I did enjoy two very quite nights at a delightful B&B nearby, Abington Farms, with long soaks in the spa, countless cups of tea on the sun-lit terrace, and hours of being engrossed in the third volume of Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu.

On my way to Cowwarr I was able to drop by the Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morwell. The changing display of the highlights from the Cbus Collection is one of the pleasures of visiting the gallery. A superb selection of abstract paintings is presently on view, and it includes works by Hilarie Mais, Robert Hunter, John Passmore, David Aspden, Ken Whisson, John Coburn, and many others. Among my personal favourites are Peter Upward’s Orange Accent II, powerful in its laconic elegance; and Jan Senbergs’ The Guardian of 1963, painted when the artist was barely 24 years old, and featuring dark, brooding figures heightened with glistening enamel, rising menacingly from the background of the picture.

I was also able to catch a CCP travelling exhibition of Simryn Gill’s photographs, Inland. Although the artist is best known for her semantically multilayered portraits of people in elaborate head-dresses of fruit and vegetable, there is only one piece from this celebrated series. Most of the exhibition concentrates on Gill’s earlier work; industrial and domestic interiors dominate the display. The suite of photographs Dalam (2001) painstakingly documents interiors of South-East Asian homes. As a body of work, it is a remarkable social document of the gulf between the rich and the poor (and everyone in-between), as the photographs of the empty rooms inevitably force the subconscious visualisation of those who populate these spaces. Viewed individually, however, the photographs lack the execution quality, compositional strength, and iconicity one would find in interior photographs of someone like Candida Höffer or Robert Polidori. Forest series of 1998 are much more accomplished from this point of view. The photographs of trees and plants are overlayed with super-imposed text, and display Gill’s superb facility with the technical side of black and white photography, a striking depth of shadow, crisp quality of sharpness, and compositional lucidity.

The adjoining gallery space features an exhibition Edge of the Worlds by Carolyn Lewens, Heather Shimmen, and Mandy Gunn. I admit to a weakness for cyanotype photographs, so works by Carolyn Lewens, the images of which remind one of transparent, deep-sea dwelling creatures, are easily my favourite in the exhibition. Heather Shimmen is represented by the remarkable prints on felt, somewhat reminiscent of Sally Smart’s artistic practice, but with a far darker, Goya-esque inspired aesthetic to her works. Mandy Gunn’s works are remarkable for the sheer effort that has gone into producing her cardboard sculptures and wall pieces. Although the number of works in the exhibition is quite extensive, the display arrangement in the gallery space is very fluid and elegant.

I was left underwhelmed by Caroline Williams’s exhibition of portraits, Beyond the Persona. It consists of a dozen representations of eminent Victorian women, including Joan Kirner, Dur-é Dara, and Christine Nixon, whose portrait has been used to promote the exhibition. This is not only because of Nixon’s recent prominence in the media, but also because this is perhaps the best work in an otherwise mediocre exhibition. Each portrait is strongly indebted to photography, and the scale markings on the pictures attest to the fact. The deployment of photography in contemporary portrait practice is widespread as can be witnessed from paintings at the National Portrait Gallery and various high-profile art competitions. However, Williams’s exhibition shows that badly taken reference photographs may result in rather mediocre works. Most portraits in the exhibition lack the sense of composition; the likenesses are poor; individual features are ill-defined; the foreshortenings are amateurish. My disappointment with the exhibition is exacerbated by the fact (and I hope I am talking about the same artist and not merely a namesake) that Caroline Williams was among the most prominent figurative painters of the last few decades, whose exquisite paintings of mysterious processions of hooded priests and of floating landmasses dotted with figures in the eighteenth-century costumes from the 1980s and 1990s deservedly grace some of Australia’s most prominent collections. The idea behind the exhibition is great, and I am among the first to carry a torch for contemporary portraiture. But the whole exercise seems rushed and poorly executed. Such carelessness from an artist of Williams’s stature and ability is therefore puzzling and sad.

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

Current Exhibitions @ Latrobe Regional Art Gallery

Sunday, 14 February 2010

Dear Diary,

Latrobe Regional Art Gallery in Morwell is but an hour and a bit away from the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale. It has a much larger and better purpose-designed building for its collection and exhibitions’ program. However, curatorially and content-wise it is worlds apart, and at times has not been able to match the curatorial strength of Sale’s gallery on exhibition by exhibition basis.

Its current offerings consist of the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, that has been travelling around Australia since 2008; the John Meade exhibition; a selection of works from the CBUS Collection; and a multimedia installation based on works by indigenous artists. The gallery also has an Access Space, which is a necessary (though not necessarily the most inspiring) part of a regional arts centre.

LRAG’s custodianship of the CBUS Collection (which has been put together over the years with the advice from the late Dr Joseph Brown) allows it to pull out at will an exhibition of good works by big-name artists, even if the curatorial theme is a bit weak, hurried, or poorly researched. The current exhibition is the case in point. Entitled Women of the World, it has good examples by John Brack, George Baldessin, Richard Larter, Arthur Boyd, Juan Davila, Ivor Francis, Sidney Nolan, Ray Crooke, David Keeling, and others. Naturally, all feature women as their main protagonists. However, the wall texts give a bland, rushed, almost Wikipedian in its sécheresse explanations about who the artists are, and where else their works are held (as if this is relevant to this particular display). No attempt whatsoever is made to discuss the diverse portrayal of women, their meaning and significance in the exhibited works in particular and in the broader context of the artists’ oeuvre in general. Even a first year BA student (let alone any member of the professional curatorial team) could have been capable of pulling out short concise statements about the works that would have had more relevance to the works on display. It is yet another example of the curatorial “laziness” encountered on recent visits to public galleries.

Tandura – Resting Place is a video projection by Gippsland’s indigenous artists Eileen Harrison, Frances Harrison, and Jennifer Mullett (Gunnai / Kurnai women), with the assistance of the multi-media artist Ian de Gruchy. Black and white aboriginal designs are projected in a continuous slide show onto the darkened space’s four walls to the accompaniment of soothing indigenous music and sounds of the forest. The resulting effect is one of the total immersion of sight and sound, a transportation into another world. The laconic simplicity of the projection, combined with the sophisticated level of aestheticism, is somewhat reminiscent of Jenny Holzer’s projections at the ACCA, though the artists are using silent images instead of words to convey their message. In my opinion, this is the one of the best exhibits at the gallery at the moment, exactly of the kind one wants to see in a contemporary, public, non-commercial exhibition space.

I cannot adequately comment upon John Meade’s exhibition, as the space is overcrowded with objects, reminiscent of a high-end interior design shop rather than a selection of sculpture, installations, and video art by this talented inter-disciplinary artist. Even three works would have sufficed in this limited space for a more powerful visual and aesthetic impact than the kaleidoscopic jumble currently on view.

I did, however, thoroughly enjoy the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award. It does not have a pre-determined curatorial direction, and therefore presents a multi-faceted snapshot of Australian drawing today, in all its styles, media, artistic, aesthetic, and conceptual directions. There is a large-scale hyper-realistic drawing of a bull by Angus McDonald, and a pair of striking portrait studies by John Philippides. There are sublimely atmospheric, abstracted works on paper by Anne Judell, Gordon Watson, and Sussie Heymans. I had another encounter with the works by Ken Smith, whose drawing A Truck Crossing the Bridge by the Sea is most likely to be an original drawing for the painting I discussed earlier in the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery’s Master Landscapes exhibition, though the drawing is naturally less contrived and stylised than the finished painting. There is a most delicate and touching work by Michelle Cawthorn, reminiscent of a crocheted, patterned doily; instantly recognisable yet always superbly executed pastel of hair by Deborah Klein and chinagraph of the nude by Godwin Bradbeer; and an innovative laser drawing by Theresa O’Connell. Striking and powerful figurative charcoals by Andrew Antoniou and Ted May provide a wonderful contrast to the delicately whimsical ink drawings by Gosia Wlodarczak.

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgement.]