Contemporary Australia: Women

125 Noël Skrzypczak Canada/Australia b.1974 Jungle (detail) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint 1600 x 1500cm (approx., installed) Noël Skrzypczak describes her work as ‘addressing the wall’, 1 and while there is an emphasis on the physicality of her paintings and their installation, her works tend to oscillate between the material and the highly evocative. Skrzypczak’s large-scale works, such as Jungle 2012, demonstrate that the formal aspects of painting can still spark the imagination. Following a semester-long exchange at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, while still a visual arts undergraduate at the Australian National University, Skrzypczak was struck by the exciting potential for painting to exist within broader artistic contexts, such as installation art. At this time, she began to experiment with materials, such as metal sheets, to assist with positioning her paintings in physical settings including stairwells and corners. She later used her technique of pouring acrylic paint to move away from traditional canvas supports, working with irregularly‑shaped MDF boards as supports. In works such as All my days 2003, Skrzypczak worked towards eradicating the support altogether by working directly with the wall. This emphasised for Skrzypczak that she wanted to involve the viewer more closely in the experience of painting — so the audience could see her paintings as inseparable from the real world, or real time. Her experiments not only expanded on current directions — she also realised her ambition to ‘set the paint free’; 2 the ‘edge’ of a painting was something no longer fixed, but malleable. Skrzypczak’s works have since tended towards painterly installations, centring on the experience of how painting can be constructed in various contexts, rather than as discrete works positioned independently on the wall. 3 With the ambitious Jungle 2012, she exploits the expansive architectural spaces of the Gallery of Modern Art. The work allows multiple viewpoints — from the awe-inspiring scale of its 15-metre length, visible from the ground floor, to the closer encounter available from the balcony of the Gallery’s upper level. The site itself makes some of the technical accomplishments of the work even more pronounced and positions Skrzypczak’s concerns against a vast backdrop. Jungle emphasises the self-referential nature of abstraction, showcasing painting’s inherent qualities of pigment and flatness, a prominent concern of mid twentieth-century art. In one regard, Skrzypczak’s work is all about paint. The process is intensely physical and the pigment’s action often indiscriminate. By pouring paint, the viscosity of the pigment guides much of the process, with accident and chance embraced as part of the technique. In the finished work, the physicality of the painting’s creation is cleverly disguised by the perfect flatness of the piece, appearing to have almost fused with the wall to become an archetypal example of modernist abstraction. Where Skrzypczak’s work departs from this particular form of flat or ‘optical’ painting is in her desire to reignite some of the imaginative aspects of painting that appeared to have been long ago superseded by the legacy of conceptual art, particularly the role of illusionism in abstract painting. Skrzypczak is captivated by the role of colour and composition in painting, as well as traditions harking back to painters she much admires, such as Giotto and Titian. She respects tradition, often beginning her works with preparatory drawings, building up pictorial elements by establishing fore-, middle- and background. Skrzypczak also uses the East Asian technique of sumi-e (black-ink painting), which she learnt as a child in primary school in Japan and revisited in 2009 during an arts residency in Tokyo. 4 The technique emphasises the importance of harmony and balance, with heavy and light accents of pigment together with white space, all considered integral components of the composition. For Skrzypczak, this process allows the artist to ‘get to know the subject matter’ she is exploring. 5 It is at the point when the drawing transforms into full‑scale painting that the work’s possibilities are ignited. As they morph, the colours alter — from harmonious to disjunctive — creating emotional resonance. Jungle 2012 references a 2005 painting of the same name, which Skrzypczak photographed, enlarged and partially reworked using ink drawing. The new iteration moves away from the dominant earthy tones of the previous painting and the literal connotations of the title, and the new work’s expanded scale opens up more space. Noël Skrzypczak Noël Skrzypczak Setting the paint free