The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Jon Cattapan was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1956. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1977 and has travelled extensively in Europe and the United States. He has held solo exhibitions in Australia and overseas almost annually since 1983, beginning with 'Paintings, Constructions and Works on Paper', Realities Gallery, Melbourne. His most recent solo exhibition has been 'Journal Entries', Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1993. Among the many group shows in which Jon Cattapan has participated are 'Australian Printmakers', touring Europe and Thailand in 1982; Moet & Chandon Touring Exhibitions, 1987 to 1992; 'The City and Beyond', touring Australian regional centres, 1990-91; Third Australian Contemporary Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, 1992; and 'Resident Alien', a two-person show with Michael Narozny at the Australian Embassy, Washington, DC, 1992. In 1985 he was commissioned to produce three lithographs celebrating Victoria's 1S0th anniversary. Jon Cattapan has been a Visiting Artist at Ohio State University and at the Australian National University, Canberra. The most recent of his numerous awards and grants has been an Australia Council Creative Fellowship which has enabled him to concentrate on painting full-time for twelve months. He is currently living and working in Canberra. Jon Cattapan is the poet of metropolitan spirit who paints atmosphere as though it were like paint itself. Over the fifteen years of his career, Cattapan's themes have moved from emotional relationships and personal totems to urban accidents and impersonal dramas on the street; recently, they have reached into the murky vistas of a city's twilight and have simultaneously focused on the preoccupations of contemporary discourse concerning representation. These themes appear in The bookbuilder. The city presents itself as a series of whitish outlines hovering over a moving ground: the relentlessly gridded geometry of the built environment resonates with an underlying subjectivity, as the streets and skyscrapers plot their architecture over teeming gestures in paint. To the sides, two little ellipses ex- tend the argument of the simultaneous construction and dissolution of the city. That on the right shows the bookbuilder of the title: he does not make a single volume- his own AUSTRALIA JON CATTAPAN The bookbuilder 1992-93 Oil on linen 213x290cm - but blindly erects a cute and pompous tower of other authors. A cynical jibe at writers on art? No, a confession that construction and vision are mediated by information systems, whether bibliographic, photographic, or computerised, as in the matrix of the city proper.Through such channels of authority in urban life, Jon Cattapan lets the romance slip back. The sky is a florid zone reminiscent of Bonnard; and such lyricism permeates the entire field. In Tail-lights fade (the West), the privilege of a high vantage point only allows the viewer to witness all the more poignantly the frustration of vision; for the features of road, car and horizon are engulfed in darkness and smog. The viewer is granted the tokens of their passing, in particular, the spectacle of the tail- lights which signal the rear, that which is destined to recede and become the end. The image does not encourage a literal reading: it functions rather as a metaphor of current speculations about the global decline of the West. Equally, 'the West' could refer to the infinite and unglamorous western suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne in which 103 the architectonic presence of former civic traditions fades in an automotive sprawl. But our gaze will be sympathetic as well as me lancholy, as Cattapan discovers luminosity in the depths and does not insinuate any cliches about stereotypical sterility of outer zones. Jon Cattapan's motifs are richly meta- phoric. The literal vehicles of Two drowned cars create semantic stress, suggesting human presence. Unlike Debussy's sub- merged cathedral, their melancholy is ironic but -like all Cattapan's art- all the spookier for being contemporary, accidental and beautiful. Robert Nelson