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Artist Tim Johnson
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There is a fair amount of apocalyptic envisioning represented in the 36 works hung for this year's Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize. But not as much as you might expect, even if this work was painted in the year preceding major and unprecedented floods and earthquakes.
There's a Darren Wardle painting, Radio Free, created in that flat air-brush style that is so anti-fine-art, where the sky is turning a lurid pink above a futuristic crash-pad site.
And there's Dane Lovett's quietly apocalyptic Double Feature, with an upturned television doubling as a plant stand: it's done in a washed-out grey green that seems sad, but somehow the image is a little bit hopeful nevertheless.
Mostly, these are paintings that work strongly within each artist's preoccupations, particularly those by older artists, such as Richard Watkins, whose French Twist is so nostalgic, with its bold slashes of red against a flat blue background.
Although it would perhaps be difficult to argue that it was a strong field for this year's biennial prize, there is definitely a good case for claiming that anyone interested in painting really should see this show.
It's a brilliantly economical survey.
Part of its pleasure is also, at first sight, part of its problem: how do you find a way in to such a show, when the walls teem with ideas expressed in such an array of styles you struggle to find a launching point for your journey around the room.
As you walk in, you see, across the room, this year's winner, Tim Johnson's Community base, alongside the meticulous and lovely Delinquent angels by Kate Bergin.
Johnson's work is busy, pushing out against the edges of the canvas, and never resolving. In homage to the desert painters he visited decades ago, he has portrayed them against a backdrop of dots which are as much to do with devotional painting as they are to do with desert painting itself. This is a work that balances refusal against acceptance: Johnson is refusing to stay within western painting traditions (by eschewing realism, and trying to dissolve the frame as a boundary) while encouraging our acceptance of Australian Indigenous painting as valid on its own terms, with reference to other spiritual traditions, rather than the canon of fine art.
Now Bergin's work is stuffed full of references to the canon, but within a contemporary viewpoint. This Bendigo painter is unashamedly intellectual, high-brow, the work richly allusive. The technique, too, is painterly, inviting close scrutiny just to enjoy the skill and knowledge with which the canvas has been prepared and completed.
Here we are, then: one, a winning painting that will hang in the Bendigo Art Gallery, tells us much about our social history and a lot more about the painter's own life and beliefs. The other, which may end up in a board room, because it is so beautiful and so beguiling, tells us equally as much about the painter's beliefs, but it has, in the end, grander intentions: its scope is mythic.
Both paintings, you'd have to say, take on a great deal, and if there is a theme linking all these works, maybe that's it.
I didn't like at all the work by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, An End to Suffering, which is both pastiche and personal odyssey, with the two artists in formal pose, she looking straight at us, him seated beside her and looking up at her in reversal of traditional roles. But I'm glad it's in the show, so I can work out why it sets my teeth on edge. (It's something to do with the insistence on showing off the issues they care about, the self-righteousness of which is probably part of the point.)
Annoying, too, is Louise Paramor's Space cadet, a glossy splurge of a work that has viewers peering behind it to see how the paint is applied. Again, good to have there. This kind of painting, which seems to have more to do with new media artworks, is coldly unrepresentational, a hard response that may well be appropriate.
Johnson said on the occasion of the announcement of the prize last month that he is disappointed with the current state of Australian painting, unimpressed by the experimentation being undertaken.
He may have a point, but painting cannot compete, in terms of experimentation, with the moving images, and their accompanying sound, which are now swamping our art galleries.
What painting can do can be seen in something like Prudence Flint's Stove, on show here. It absolutely requires you to stop still, and firstly examine this simple work, then let its atmosphere invade you. Finally, it is deeply unnerving. It's a cleanly painted image of a woman about to light the gas jets on a stove, domestic and simple. The flat colours give it cartoon feel, and the woman's accentuated curves, her tiny hands, the scarf on her head, all add to the unreal. Yet this woman is so real she throbs. That's quite a feat, and it's why painting is an art we can be passionate about.
Celeste Chandler, too, manages something magic with her Lustre diptych, two photo-realistic images of a face swathed in a lather that almost threatens to set and contain the face forever.
There are paintings here that seem too ambitious for the canvas, where the idea cannot be contained, or the idea itself doesn't seem worthy of isolating on a canvas and hanging on a white wall in a public gallery.
But more often than not, the tension between all the artist's preoccupations and the flat square of colour on which they try to find a way to express them gives the work integrity and value.
Displayed intelligently in a space that ideally would be bigger, this show ultimately wins you back to believing that painting is still the most satisfying of the visual arts.
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