The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

EUGENE CARCHESIO - THE ORDER OF DECAY 'A life process . . . always moving ... creating ... breathing with your head. Indicating what is perhaps beyond things. ' 1 The humility that characterises Eugene Carchesio's art often has a very direct effect on viewers; its intimate scale tends to invite quiet wonder and private contemplation. For many years he has eschewed the debates and discourses of postmodernity - preferring instead to maintain his practice as a self-taught artist, using recycled materials as the primary elements in an evocative symbolic language of colour, form and light. His choice of humble materials and processes does not, however, detract from the poetic presence of the works, which evolve intuitively in a spirit often of homage, but also in a kind of celebratory deference to the profound mystery of life. Invisibility, mystery, energy, and silence are words that recur in the vocabulary of Carchesio's work. He engages with these ineluctable concepts through images which activate them in ways that discourse cannot. Eugene Carchesio came to the attention of Queensland audiences in the early 1980s through independent and artist– run spaces. By the end of the 1980s and early 1990s he had attained national recognition, and was represented in the 'Third Australian Sculpture Triennial', 'Australian Perspecta 1989' and the 'Moet and Chandon Touring Exhibition'. His small watercolours, matchbox constructions, collages and drawings are immediate and diaristic. They are completed in bursts of creative energy giving the impression of urgency; the support and materials are secondary - the idea is paramount and must be recorded before it dissipates. This immediacy is not, however, at the expense of an exquisite subtlety, precision, or sensitivity of execution. Carchesio deploys the aqueous, transparent qualities of watercolour to great effect in emphasising the mutable and transient. Collectively, these 'notational' works accumulate and combine to form bodies of images and objects rich in association and connectivity. 42 APT2002 The leaves depicted in Dead leaves of Tokyo 1999 Photographs: The artist 187 works for the People's Republic of Spiritual Revolution 1975-90 is such a work. This accumulated body of work is retrospective in its span, in addition to being a kind of work in progress. The works were compiled and, in a sense, curated by the artist for an exhibition at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art in 1990. Within them are some of the iconic ideas and themes that occupy a central position in Carchesio's work. The majority of these small paintings, collages and drawings have been executed on sheets of graph paper - a type that recalls a pre– computer age of school exercise books. The sheets contain a variety of fragments and materials, such as pressed petals, paintings, photos, designs, lists, drawings, old stamps, typewritten poems, cut-up poetry, fragments of cloth and found imagery. The apparent randomness of the imagery creates its own strange dialogue, reflecting a restrained and subtle debt to surrealist practice. (My first experience of the work was to bring each page out of the tin that contained them, turning them over, one at a time, like pages from a loose-leaf book.) The printed grid becomes a strong formal device in many of the works where the artist has allowed it to impose its regularity and precision on the development of a painting. In other examples its rigidity dissolves under delicate washes of pigment. Eugene Carchesio Australia b.1960 Dead leaves of Tokyo (details) 1999 Watercolour on paper 15 of 39 compositions: 35.6 x 28cm each Purchased 1999 Ivy Lillian Walton Bequest Collection: Queensland Art Gallery