Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Coming alive- in -a paper -filled room "I WART to shake hands with the man who made Australians come alive." This was a European lady in Melbourne, meeting Warren Knight, the artist chiefly responsible for "The Garden Party," an environment at The Age Gallery in Melbourne. The gallery is now run as a branch of the Na- tional Gallery of Vic- toria, for avant-gardo happenings. Ti Parks and Guy Stu- art were also involved, but it was mainly War- ren Knight's affair. Knight's exhibition of large black and white paintings that looked like writing will be remem- bered at Walters. Sydney. 'The Garden Party" used actual black and white newspapers appropriately for The Age's premises. Thd room is filled shoulder high with tossed newspapers, each day. You swim through it, or dive under. You encoun- ter a few softish sandbag islands on the floor: sometimes you trample a buried person. A sound system whispers "Deep pile" over and over, and also transmits noises from some other empty rooms which you can enter be - foie you reach the big paper -filled room. These small empty rooms each have a bank of neon types in the ceil- ing. One room is red, one blue, one green, and so on. The intense colored light is unnerving. Most people are unhappy in the green room. They found they blood?) In the red room, they are cheered up a bit by a bronse-gold room. Perhaps because the colored -light rooms are such a violent experience, everybody opens up in the paper-room. They jump, lie on their backs and kick -and it's not only children who do this, it's Toorak matrons as well. Which is why the European lady was amazed by the Aus- tralians coming to life. * * * Tim Johnson and Peter Kennedy at Gal- lery t. Sydney, also use neon lights. but not to blast you into another world. Instead their lights, and plastic con- stsuctions, comment on the spaces they inhabit. Light glows gently in a corner of the ceiling, rolls across the floor into a doorway. It all seems ex- cessively refined and ele- gant after the violence of Warren Knight. Peter Kennedy also shows lots of photo- graphs taken at regular time intervals all of the same bank of tubes in a neon factory. There's a good idea here about how everything is more dif- ferent than we realise. We might think each mass production object is the same; or that one ob- ject is the same today as it was last week. But each moment is unique and different, and the moment of observation alters the object which is observed. * * * Donald Commons Vil- liers) seems to have liv- ed quietly in a Sydney backwater, in his case from the 1870s until his death in 1942. If the 50 Mndoc.ane watercolors and small oils are the bulk of what survives, perhaps he never produced enough to be considered as a professias an eonal ngine (here). worked Perhaps it was less eorrupt 111( to be an amateur than a profes- sional for these works have a mast engaging duality. They are liberatcd. I mean they are liberated from routine illustration of landscape, and per- haps liberated from the. need to be saleable in their own time. More than most of his contemporaries he seems to have loved his medi- um for its own sake - either washiest water- color or clean white paper, or crusty rich oils, both obviously man- ipulated with great pleasure and affection. The ostensible subjects seascapes, trees, old buildings, are only ex- cuses to cover a surface with lovely pigments. Structurally t).ese pic- tures fell apa. t if too much is in them, but the simpler ones hav, a disarming belief in the value of art as a worth- while activity., For an idea of what they look like: the water- colors resemble those of B. E. Minns, both early and late, and in general they have a turn of the ART with Daniel Thomas century aestheticism (Gerald Fitzgerald was a similar watercolorist at the time). The oils are paralleled, in their rich texture, by those of How- ard Ashton. * * * The Villiers Gallery moved last week from Double Bay to temporary premises above Robert Ypres' Native Art Gallery. Its own new premises, also in Gurner Street, Paddington, open next year. Icillo Martich-Severi (Sebert Gallery): A small retrospective by a Vene- tian in spirit, who came to Australia in 1950. and who, like Donald Com- mons, has never had much public exposure, It is full of touching pleasure. Perhaps a con- stant reference, uncon- scious, is to the soft iri- descence of Venetian walls, light everywhere, rippling onto pink and apricot plaster. This comes through even in the later cubist abstracts, a bit like Magnelli, not really like Frank Hinder. He deserves to be much better known. John Peart (Wafters) paintings sent out from England, where he seems to be going through a wildly experimental phase. Upstairs some dia- monds in narrow rec- tangles, easily related to Ills work of 1988, which often pushed into the four corners of the can- vas, colors would darken, frame become dense, or the canvas itself would even bend forme* The new corner -pic- tures are more open, and the elements are linear, sometimes Islamic linear, like Ktific script. Downstairs it's more of a surprise, Large informal wandering color lines, no longer either symmetri- cal or allover. and at first sight reminiscent of the once -fashionable English abstractionist Harold Cohen (whatever became of Harold Co- hen?). In at least one the colors might imply a Chinese reference; lac- quer -red, jade, celadon, imperial -yellow. But otherwise they seem more concerned with explor- ing liquidity of color, and, again, an aqueous ex- perience has run through a lot of his work. And if they have an old-fashioned Harold Cohen or early Franken- thaler look, one can see the logical necessity for trying it out, and respect the courage in doing it. And they are, after all, very lovely. Ray Crooke (Macquarie) once painted all - brown outback landscapes that showed a very sure con- trol of tone. Sometimes he would wreck pictures with large areas of milt - of -tone primary color, like the red dresses worn by native figures. Now his canvases are bigger, they've changed from monochrome brown to close -tone blue -greens whose tonal effect is odd and iridescent. The color areas are becoming hard - edged and separate, and the notes of strong color are smaller and less dis- ruptive. Besides the new tropic blue color-scheme he has a new surface, the coarse - grained canvas strongly evident. It makes the paintings look a bit like woven tapestry. It also reminds us that long ago he worked on screen- printed fabrics. It further invokes the thought that these are pictures whose limited color range and separated color areas make them very easy to reproduce; that they therefore look a bit like color reproduc- tions already; and there- fore the larger size and the coarse -textured can- vas are ways of insisting that- these are indeed original oil paintings. Yvonne Audette (Holds - worth) has a sort of ret- rospective back to 1958. It's very curious that in 1959-60 she was produc- ing work, in Florence, that is amazingly similar to John Passmore's work done at the same time in Sydney. She had studied with Passmore before she left Sydney in 1952, but couldn't have seen his work till she returned in 1966. It's so long since Pass - more has exhibited that a whole generation probab- ly knows nothing of his work. The shiftingness of the elusive images is what Yvonne Audette shares with him: her color is different, more to do with the element earth, while Passmore's element is water. Remember - The Art Gallery of New South Wal n es is ow closed. It reopens next year trans- formed into a place which Lc safe foe housing =tutimilig4,4 where. rn 70