From Andrew Frost…
You will no doubt instantly recognise the scenes in Halinka Orszulok’s latest series of paintings. Night-time scenes of parks and reserves, floodlit shopping centre car parks and lonely highways stretching into darkness lit only by the glow of headlights, have long been a source of fascination for Orszulok. Her painstaking translation of her photographic source material into paint isolates and makes strange these already undead spaces and their play of artificial light, places that are neither night or day, but dead zones of troubled dreams.
Where Orszulok’s previous paintings had evidenced a fascination for the play of light in these nightscapes, she has introduced a new element into the work – a series of clues hidden in the images that citizens of suburbia will be familiar with – the tell tale marks of ‘circle work’ on the tarmac, the burnt out remains of a car post-joy ride. The stillness of Orszulok’s paintings belie the hectic action that has taken place out of frame, a wild act of pointless rebellion that shatters the nothingness of the fake daylight. In one painting the words – DONT FALL ASLEEP – are tagged on a concrete wall, suggesting the infamous title of Goya’s etching.
April 30 to May 17
Flinders Street Gallery, Surry Hills
Pic: Halinka Orszulok, Don’t Fall Asleep, 2014. Oil on canvas, 52x75cms.
