What is it about taking an artist’s signature and turning it into a brand that’s so utterly dodgy? At Tim Olsen Gallery, the latest John Olsen show features the maestro’s signature featured on a wall in the gallery window. One glance and you think you’re in The Rocks. That the artist’s name is rendered on a yellow wall makes it all the more difficult to look at. Inside, however, you are in much more experienced hands with John Olsen delivering the goods in lovely frames around generous canvases and prices that’ll set you back anywhere between $65,000 and $220,000.
For an artist of Olsen’s undoubted excellence these are the kind of prices you’d be paying for unmitigated masterpieces, especially considering they are fresh to the primary market and are untested at auction. But Olsen, a senior artist whose reputation precedes him, is recycling many of the motifs that one associates with a “John Olsen” – the abstract landscape with a big, flat central shape, fluid and biomorphic lines, and the spare, precise colours and lines of the more minimal works. They are authoritative and brilliantly produced, but lack any kind of real excitement. You feel as though you are in the presence of greatness but are rendered dumb by the assumption that you are not worthy.
The thing about Olsen which we must remind ourselves is that he is an artist who richly deserves his dotage. He is a cultural warrior who stuck out the dark years of conservative forces in this country to produce a body of work that has not been properly reckoned with. Olsen is the art life incarnate – a beret wearing bon viveur who can paint frogs until – well – until the frogs come home. The best thing we ever heard about him was that when Leeuwin Estate launched their Art Series wine with his frog art labels, the canny artist waived payment for an annual delivery of the new vintage. Now that’s what we call living. Never mind that the art, enjoy the age.
