Conceptualists eventually drop off. There’s nothing they can do about it, and it seems inevitable that they’ll drift away into teaching jobs or curating exhibitions or changing tack into undemanding, decorative painting. Robert Macpherson has somehow resisted all that.
The thing we always find startling about Macpherson is that people seem to forget about him and lose track of the fact that he’s been building up a monumental body of work that is extraordinarily consistent and conceptually brilliant. At 67 years of age, he’s still making amazingly vigorous art and we can’t shake the thought that if Macpherson was 33 years old, he’d be ruling the world. Of course, if he were 33 years old, he probably wouldn’t be making work of such stunning, elegant simplicity that carries with it both the authority of the master artist as well as the suppleness and lightness of gesture and thought that characterizes his work.
At Yuill/Crowley until July 3 is a show by Macpherson called Mayfair: Eleven Paintings, Eleven Signs, Yellow-Red-Green (Autumn) for Mrs. Brisbane. You can take a title like that, stick it in your pipe and smoke it! Speaking of pipes, or indeed, things that are not a pipe but appear to be, Macpherson continues in this show his fascination with language and its complex relationship to objects.
There are eleven paintings of fruits – apples, lemons, pears (or similar) – painted over two boards that are hung vertically. The painterly qualities of the pictures appear fairly straightforward, repetitive shapes with variations in colours to suit the fruit depicted, simple gestures reminiscent of sign writing techniques for the stems and leaves, rollered-on colours for the body of the shape and the backgrounds. But it’s only on a second or third look that you notice that the colours don’t quite line up with what the images are supposed to be, the colours too dark, off-kilter or perhaps just flat out wrong. It’s when you do this double or triple take on the work, you realise that the idea that these pictures are of apples, lemons and pears is entirely notional. It’s not to be underestimated that the pun in the title of the show is “Eleven Signs” – not the roadside fruit stall images of fruit, or the fruit itself, but the whole problematical relationship between the signified and the sign.
The great thing about Macpherson is that this familiar strategy of Conceptual art – the altering of process to reveal the workings of the idea – is delivered with the beauty of light reflected on water, a dancing, subtle delivery that’s truly amazing. We’d show you some pictures of the work but Yuill/Crowley don’t seem to believe in the necessity of a web site in this day and age and we salute their adherence to the 19th Century – some say their exhibition invitations are delivered by a cloaked rider who only appears at the full moon, but that may only be a rumour.
