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CURATORIAL  ESSAY  

The works in this exhibition were chosen as a small group that represent a renewed and emergent interest in geometric painting in Sydney. The eleven artists are a sample of a much larger effect sweeping through the independent artist run spaces of Sydney and indeed Australia since the early years of the 21st century. Some of the artists have carried through with this kind of painting throughout their careers and others have turned to it more recently, although all have remained steadfastly committed to geometric art this century.

This group of eleven is only the tip of the geometric iceberg. There are now hundreds of artists, in Sydney alone but many more in the other Australian states making work under the various conceptual rubrics associated with geometry. These conceptual approaches, including Hard Edge painting, Non-objective Art and Colour Field painting have been driven by particular artists, curators and writers, often with all three activities merged within the one person or small group. Their names are perhaps too many to mention here but they know who they are. The resurgence of physical painting in art schools has included geometric work both in object based painting and in activities such as wall painting.

While geometric art, particularly painting is mentioned in art history, especially in Australia, the explanations for the work draw upon mostly well-known European theoretical positions and ideas, such as the “spiritual” or “human essence.” There has been little of know reconfiguring of geometric art that takes into account contemporary intellectual effort or current global problems. Hopefully, this exhibition might inspire the kind of reflection needed to begin that work, lest the enthusiasm for geometric art becomes just another bourgeois 20th century style aesthetic movement.

There is a particularly cruel objectivity that allows people to imagine themselves from the outside as if they were alien to themselves. Since most people have been able to see the world from above, either on tall buildings, in air travel or indeed as astronauts, this alien perspective has become a visible experience. Indeed, people who have a computer are now able to see, using “Google Earth,” an accurate representation of the world as if they were alien.

Looking down on the planet, an alien would see surface effects, such as light and dark, land and sea and atmospheric effects such as clouds, storms and clear air. These effects move in what seem like flows of varying intensity within a moving system of dynamic curved lines of difference. In contrast to these curved systems is the global appearance of static straight lines that form edges, angles and grids. Not only does this other form of geometry contrast with the first. It also contradicts the light relationship of the sun and the Earth. Small dots of light seem to be made up of much smaller points that describe edges, angles and grids on the surface. Thus the surface of the planet appears as a dynamic interplay between two contrasting forms of geometry.

However, it is not until one discovers that the straight-line geometry is the product of a particular life form that the secret of this contrast is revealed. From an alien perspective, human habitation is the expression of a particular form of geometry within or even against another. Human geometry is transformative. Complex and dynamic curvilinear edges are transformed into static straight lines and folded lines are transformed into crossing angles then formed into extendable grids.

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History has recorded the diversity of this transformation in every culture as complex aesthetic practices such as agriculture, art, design and architecture. Indeed human activity can be regarded as a the expression of geometry from micro (or nano) to macro scale, from all the sciences to the strange world of rational argument in the humanities and in art making, from the use of geometry in the construction of representational images to expressions of pure geometry itself.

The single clear feature of human inhabitation is the transformation of the material surface of the Earth as geometry. But this is a self-image. Humanity takes up an alien position in order to see itself anew – through its own terms, its own self-framing with ideas. Geometry is one of these ideas. Geometry is a fundamentally alien self-imagining of contemporary humanity given expression as aesthetic practice. This naturally makes geometry attractive to artists and perhaps suggests that an interest in geometry is also an interest in expression self-imagery as some kind of human essence or the ‘spirit’ of being human. It seems that humanity strives to know itself and does so with images from an imagined outside, just as the cave painters of Lascaux painted an imagined image from the outside.

Geometric painting is filled with this alien self-imagining as if it were each artist’s personal need to see shapes and material colours transformed by edges, angles and lines into an alien self-image: geometry. In the past, artists have described this transformation as “spiritual,” mechanical,” “industrial,” “abstract” or even “Zeitgeist.” We no longer have the luxury of a mysticism to fill the gaps in self-imagining and thereby claim it as truth. Instead there is only the work and each work is an individual artist’s individual self-imagined transformation of materials.

As edge, angle and line colours becomes shapes, the surface itself becomes a shape. Edges become lines and form angles at crossings. Angles are repeated and they become grids. Grids become meaning with words and colours and the transformative power of human imagination is fulfilled and imagined self-alienation is no longer regarded as pathological but instead as productive and positive. The question for all alien self-imagination in geometric painting is how to establish a relationship with an artwork between curves and straight lines, between right angles and oblique or obtuse ones, between the complex Bezier-like curve and the conic section and of course the relationship between repetition and the grid. In the process of finding this relationship, one might also ask how this reflects humanity’s place on Earth. Geometry after all means the measure of the Earth and if humans are part of the Earth then they too must be included in its measurement.

I would like to thank the gallery owners and fellow organisers Hilarie Mais and Jess Mais-Wright. I would also like to thank Richard Dunn for his expert advice on hanging and who seemed to be tireless in helping me with the installation. But I would like to especially thank the artists and their galleries for making their work available for the exhibition.

Tom Loveday, 2015.

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Coen Young, I always immediately forgot what I wanted to say, 2012, 2-pac enamel on aluminium, 230 x 110

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Matthys Gerber, Nail Painting #1, 2015, oil on canvas, 77 x 77 cm.

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Tom Loveday, Red Memorial, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 210 cm x 180 cm

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Hilarie Mais, Rotation in Blue #1, 2010, oil on canvas, 183 x 183 cm

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Debra Dawes, unspoken, 2014, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm.

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Marinka Bozzec, Highway Gothic, 2007, coloured pencil on paper, 231 x 134.1 cm.

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David Serisier, a. untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting, 2012, oil and wax on linen, 214 x 214 cm.

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Jess Mais-wright, Fountain, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 122 cm.

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Wendy Abel Campbell, At Home with Coloured Things III, 2015, Synthetic polymer on plywood with shelf, 10 x 40 cm.

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Richard Dunn, Irregular five-sided figure, 1 – 5 rotation, 2015, 5 units variable dimensions, acrylic on canvas.

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Caroline Karlsson, Haussman, 2014, Acrylic on Board, 64 x 50 x 8 cm.

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Caroline Karlsson, Le Marais, 2014, Acrylic on Board, 38 x 54 cm.

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Caroline Karlsson, Verktyg, 2014, Acrylic on Board 80 x 103 cm x 12 cm.

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William Wright, Barak, 2014, Oil on Wood, 133 x 125 cm

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Sydney Ball, Infinex #20, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 135 cm.

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Sydney Ball, Infinex #12, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 130 x 150 cm

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William Wright, Est, 2014, oil on wood, 89 x 58

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Published by William Wright Artists Projects, 2015.