The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

EUGENE CARCHESIO • • Carchesio has spoken of the importance of titles and how they are like small poems. Often, they have a 'programmatic' tone such as 187 works for the People 's Republic of Spiritual Revolution, which echoes VladimirTatlin's Monument to the Third International of 1919. By contrast, Dead leaves of Tokyo 1999 (Queensland Art Gallery Collection) is both descriptive and inherently poetic. It clearly establishes the conceptual simplicity and clarity of this body of work while also reflecting an emphatic, haiku-like brevity. Continuing with his preference for working in series, Carchesio embarked on this project while completing a three-month residency at the Australia Council's Tokyo studio in 1999. An abiding interest in Japanese culture (particularly film) did not prepare the artist for the overwhelming effect of the Tokyo metropolis. The spectacle of consumption is delivered with such intensity and efficiency in the Japanese city that the visitor is quite literally enveloped by an ecstatic dimension of speed, light and movement. In conversation, 4 Carchesio has mentioned that the idea of collecting and rendering decayed leaves emerged soon after his arrival in Tokyo, and was largely in response to this shimmering culture of surface and effect. His sojourns to public places and monuments such as temples, gardens and museums were occasions to collect, at random, decaying leaves that became the subject of intense, meditative scrutiny. The works were usually completed at night under artificial light, which resulted in cast shadow becoming a prominent feature of each painting . To see aWorld in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour . There is something of Blake's famous lines in these delicate paintings. It is possible to view them as microcosms of nature and its processes, as melancholy indices of decay and transition . Carchesio has referred to the regimen of collecting and rendering these traces of nature as an exercise in which he sought to centre himself amidst a culture of excess and abundance. In a manner typical of the artist's intuitive approach to his work, he opted for a simple and appropriately Zen-like response to his situation and environment. By methodically collecting, studying and painting each leaf, the series evolved in accordance with his philosophy of an accumulative practice. These small paintings convey a temporal dimension, whereby each painting may be seen as a single, unique and irretrievable moment in the continuum of time. A deeply felt reverence for nature has historically been an intrinsic element of Japanese culture. Although this may not appear as prominent today, its ritualised and pervasive presence in celebrating the passage of seasonal change and the construction, maintenance and use of gardens and natural reserves are testimony to its enduring power. The visual poetry of Japanese gardens - from bonsai to carefully raked pebble gardens - is a result of an acutely tuned balance of scale and view. The reflective echoing of nature and the cosmos in the microcosm of the garden is at the heart of these designs. Some of that reverberation may be detected in Carchesio's salvaged remnants and, like the skeletal architecture of these curled and crumbling carcasses, the network of connectivity points to the paradoxical order of decay - that is, renewal and continuity. David Burnett is an Education Officer at the Queensland Art Gallery. 45