Boo sculpture, blah blah video, la la la photography – but yeah, painting. It always feels like the pressure is off when we’re looking at a painting: we know the limits, know the borders, the history and are thrilled at the possibility of something new. We can’t explain it – we just love the smell of oil paint in the morning and a whole lot of canvases in an exhibition by people we don’t know is just about the most fun you can have in a gallery. We are of course prepared to be disappointed and so often are but the experience of painting is palpably different to just about everything else. It was once said that the piano was the king of the orchestra because, within its range timbres and tonalities from the faint whisper to the crescendo, it embodied everything that could be done with an orchestra. If the art world is a bunch of people in dickie bows and nightgowns bashing symbols together, then painting is the piano of all the forms.
OK. Something ‘new’. It’s always a disappointing illusion, a receding fad located just over the horizon. Video is dead, forget video. Sculpture is just so dull. Works on paper? Pfft, yeah right. Photography? We’ve got a problem with photography. The next time someone says “it’s not what it is, it’s what you do with it…” please remember that Gary Sweet may be a good actor but it doesn’t make his penis any larger [cf. Alexandra’s Project]. On the other hand, video art is cool and sculpture is the new video and works on paper return a hefty premium on a wise investment and photography – hey, the world is made of photography!
Seraphine Pick, Open Secrets, 2004, oil on linen, 60x50cms.
Which brings us back to painting. Could it be, we ask tremulously, whispering, that something is happening in painting? Looking around at exhibitions, as we do, we have started to notice [let’s call it a tendency] towards a loose, pictorial figurative painting that has its roots in a lot of different places – loose drawing, crafty, simple colours, naïve elements, fake childish, images often sourced from vintage magazines and books. Yes, saying that something is happening is the clarion call of the complete bastard – “painting is back, people, and it’s time to get in on the action”. Bullshit. Painting has never been away but at the same time it’s like Austria. You’re thinking Germany but it’s a completely different place.
Sometimes when we have a public thought we can already hear people speaking inside our heads – oh bullshit Art Life, get your shit together and all that – but aside from the voices, this seems really real. It’s possible that it’s been going on for ages and we just didn’t realise [we thought that Neo Rauch was just a new version of Rauchism] but on top of the Mike Parr selected Sulman Prize, Tim Schultz at Kaliman, the Sally Ross show at Gertrude Street and Nell’s show at Oxley we’re starting to see a very clear and interesting development that marks a move away from seemingly endless permutations of Post Grunge and the last gasps of Conceptual Abstraction and the generally untutored mess of most painting you see in artist run spaces [if in fact you see any].
We don’t know what you’d call it but the most interesting time for anything is before it gets named, turns into a genre and promptly dies. Whatever it might be called, there seems to be some prime examples of it at Kaliman Gallery. We mentioned Schultz and Ross shows there as well, and now there’s a show by Sérpahine Pick called Shared Air. Like Ross and others, Pick uses old magazine images for her pictorial source material and, for her, it’s the life aquatic that appeals most; flipper chicks, vulva shaped shells, pearl eyes and a goodly dose of cheap horror mixed in for kicks. Her work has the familiar flatness that much of this kind of painting has but unlike the work of artists who copy direct from photos as their entire image, the flatness is obscured by the way she treats the canvas like a piece of paper in a manner similar to the work of her stable mates David Griggs and Adam Cullen. One section of the Pick’s paintings may be a close up of a shell or a flower while another section is a sweeping underwater playground.
The paintings have a sense of humour and a palpable creepiness. Although you can see that these sightless women and aquatic princesses are jokey, there is something decidedly darker at work. Setting up a figure without eyes is as hoary a joke as you can find, something straight out of Hammer Horror, but it undeniably works. Like Nell’s show, this is suburban horror, but without the panel vans and sea monkeys instead. Instead of the blank fascination of all those artists who mangle photo images together for no other reason than that they like them, artists such as Pick offer something else. It’s the kind of amalgam of fascination, intention, subject and ambiguity that offers an alternative to overtly conceptual practices or subject-free formalism. We don’t know if it’s new, but it is different.
