Review PERTH

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I roll over. Eyes wide open, I fumble for my mobile and check the time. It’s 1:23am again, I must have woken up at this time over one hundred times in my life. There’s something about this sequential thing that freaks me out a little. At this time of night it seems mystical or some s**t. Anyway, I can’t sleep, so despite everything I have read about blue light syndrome and as conscious as I am of the effect of my social media usage I quickly open up Facebook. “Nothing like a machine to make a man feel insignificant” I think to myself as I’m doing it and as I’m browsing apolitical posts by apathetic art students. I think to myself, we are rather simple, aren’t we? I switch over to chat and I see Holly, she was Active 23m ago.

Wintermute looks into Yoshida’s personal interiors, spaces in which to engage, offering a patina of her life. There is a certain estrangement we have to these paintings; they are glimpses of very familiar locations, corners of ceilings, lights and walls. It is a psychological tension, empowering and intimate that perhaps reflect our own struggle between the individual and our surroundings.

Through the engagement with the activity of painting, Yoshida activates these psychological spaces. Incredibly flat, built up layers of dry brushed oil paint with little to no glazing using a monochromatic palette framed in such a way that obviously has come from images from a phone screen. There is a detachment to this painting, it being almost scientific painting. What she sees, what she doesn’t know. These works are punctuated by intimate didactics, text messages or chats with friends, colleagues, lovers, which give clue to their origins.

It is this space she is interested in, giving us an uncensored look into intimacy and vulnerability. Yoshida states “the correspondence acts as an exteriorization to the interior settings of the paintings. I wanted to create a familiar frame around the paintings that could provide an access point for the viewers to bring themselves to the work.”
But it is a kind of faceless intimacy. The works leave us with a sense of hopelessness, simply titled “Active 23m ago.”

It is difficult to tell if Yoshida is acting as scenographer, creating new fictions using social media platforms and personal text messages as a framework for the paintings; or perhaps these are real afterthoughts, a Carveresque moment of stillness, her own collection of nature mortes, where she omits nothing. Either way, her practice is introspective, as it is considered.

image: Holly Yoshida, Active 1m ago (detail), 2016, oil on board, 24 x 33 cm, photo by Ben Waters

A sordid caper, in paint.

Having the opportunity to preview Ryck Rudd’s Capriccio! series is an overwhelming experience. It gives an insight into not only this vast body of work, but also the man behind the painting. Rudd himself has a difficult politic to tie down. He is in his mid twenties, sports a manicured waxed moustache and has long flowing shoulder length hair, almost like one of his heroes from the depths of art history that he reveres so closely; or perhaps he is a caricature from the BBC television series the Desperate Romantics depicting the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. One is never quite sure. What I do know is that Rudd is not afraid of playing the philodox, always speaking his mind, fervently antagonistic, and yet constantly in a reflexive and mediating state when it comes to his own praxis.

Looking at the earliest work in the Capriccio! series 2013-2014, we see tortured pasty faced carny types. There is a frugality to this work, colour is used incredibly sparingly leaving everything rather insipid, atonal in fact, creating a flatness across the picture plain, with no distinguishing between figure and landscape. Everything is pallid. These early portraits offer us an insight into his growth as a painter and the work we now see before us in 2017. Much of that earlier work had sat disconsolate in his studio for years and is now beginning to fruit, showing signs of maturation. I respect this about Rudd’s practice. He is happy to show you through his dirty work, his sideshow of freaks, the unfinished business.

In contrast, looking at the latter paintings it is obvious from the outset that Rudd’s work is driven by drawing. This new focus is where he does much of his tinkering, hundreds upon hundreds of pages of finely drafted pencil drawings and watercolours, as if it is a way to getting it out from his unquiet mind. It is in paint though where he thinks, really thinks, working and re-working composition over composition, losing any idea of preciousness. As a colleague of mine says, ‘painting is not a legally binding contract’. Rudd has this clarity of mind when working. He is constantly visually editing the histories of his painting, forcing new ways of seeing upon his surface. Works live and works die and works are re-incarnated in Rudd’s practice. However, all the ideas, the notations, the drafting, is all there for easy reference if a Mark II is ever required.

"As a young boy I longed to see what lies beneath a Barbie doll's dress. This initial curiosity has developed into an interest in what motivates us as human beings. My latest paintings explore the psychology behind our s*xual obsessions."

Rudd has an undeniable authorial hand, his handle of the material of paint is charged with a macabre s*xuality which is reminiscent of Ensor. His marks are consistent and much like his newly developing subject matter, have a squirminess to them. As the work has developed Rudd has embraced a higher chroma palette. Reworking the muted and underdressed has revealed much more in the painting, a kind of psychological pentimenti, allowing the images to become less reliant on just their pictorial narrative and more on the quality of the mark and the hand of the artist, the act of painting itself, layer upon layer, opening up a spatiality in the work, which shows a certain nod to Vuillard.

He is also now becoming more confident with his story telling. These new paintings are like a licentious romp from the set of Gore Vidals 1979 film Caligula cast with a group of gender bending intemperate rubenesque cherubs, riding the fine and ever closing line of obscenity, which is not surprising considering he cites the likes of Georges Bataille, Ken Russell and Balthus as some of his most venerated artists.

Rudd’s work The goods 2016 shows three Romanesque puttis, ivy wreath intact, naked and crawling over a table of loose, nondescript meat, perhaps eating it? One putto has his hand extended as if to welcome his new guests. One is facing towards this gastronomic feast and the other is leaning forward, crutching his stomach and dry retching, all of them with their eyes shut as if in disgust at what that have just done, or are about to do.

Yet these Capriccio! paintings aren’t shocking. Like many contemporaries that have come before him Rudd actively mediates his world by separating figuration from any sense of reality. They might leave us with a sense of unease depicting s*xual acts between these distorted and disfigured young putti and cherubs, questioning our own ideas of decadence, s*xual identity, discovery and desire. Make no mistake, these works are autobiographical for Rudd, translated by him in his first language, paint.

Ben Waters, 2017

Assuming the role
2014
Oil on wood
60.5 cm x 75.5 cm

An unconscious everyday of the city
Ben Waters and Paige Luff

‘One thing is certain: although historical moments in the life of a city can be isolated, the urban process never stops. Unlike works of art—or even certain buildings, which have a more determinate existence—streets are as mutable as life itself and are subject to constant alterations through design or use that foil the historian’s desire to give them categorical finitude’ (Çelik, Favro, & Ingersoll, 1994, p. 1).

In Be on time 2011 at spectrum project space ECU Galleries, Andrée pays homage to these often forgotten arterials of everyday life and to the people that walk these surfaces. The works offer a kind of reverence that can only be understood through making and doing. In this process of moving from place to place, a linear, normative and historical way of thinking about the city can be evidenced. For Andrée though, it is the slippages in this journey that are imbued with meaning. This linear trajectory is unfolded and allows us insight into Andrée’s reverie, hypnotically, step after step in the piece ‘Twenty-five degrees two hundred and fifty-two minutes and twenty-four seconds’ (2011-2012). This trajectory is not simply linear, but ventures into a metonymic exploration of the city, with the frames of individual pedestrians allowing for the gaps of what is desired/being sought to appear.

Andrée actively takes control of this process of being a city pedestrian through building the loom on which she weaves this inquiry into the urban everyday, in a physical sense through the creation of fabrics, and in a conceptual sense through the process of labour. One could be reminded of Penelope in The Odyssey who weaves and unweaves the fabric she creates on her loom each day, this process being an act of deferral whilst also creating meaning and signification. Rather than simply interlacing and combining details into a whole in ‘6000 steps’ (2012), the meditative process of weaving also creates gaps and slippages through which points de capiton are created. Paving is made from silver foam sponges in ‘Clearing’ (2012) which absorb pedestrians steps like memory, and woollen handknitted and felted plywood pavers are laid on the ground in ‘A plied away’ (2011-2012). It is as if the scale of the weaving spills out and through this one loom of ‘6000 steps’ to the space and works around it.

These pieces create textuality through the physical form and process of fabrication and weaving, provide playful ways of making meaning and signification rather than non-meaning, and create a sense of place in the urban everyday by drawing attention to stable, fixed meanings. In ‘Streets and the Urban Process: A Tribute to Spiro Kostof’, criticism of fixed, historical meanings are explored. “By shifting the subject of inquiry from architecture or buildings to urban fabric, he made a relatively safe field dangerous: no longer limited to privileged protagonists, fixed chronologies, established technologies, and finite artifacts, the discipline was forced to comprehend the multitude of users, their cultures, and the conflicting interests of any urban situation” (Çelik et al., 1994, p. 1). This ahistorical approach, rather than eroding a sense of memory and place, absorbs it, amplifies it, and offers both the artist and viewer a reflexive unconscious language in which to explore the city.

Çelik, Z., Favro, D. & Ingersoll, R. (1994). Streets and the Urban Process: A Tribute to Sprio Kostoff. In Z. Çelik, D. Favro & R. Ingersoll (Eds.), Streets: Critical perspectives on public space (pp. 1-7). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ben Waters is an Artist and arts writer from Perth Western Australia
Paige Luff is an Arts writer and Librarian from Perth Western Australia

Welcome to ReviewPERTH, a brand new forum for myself and friends to share reviews and musings on the art scene of Perth. So if anyone has anything they’d like to share, please DM me.

As an amateur art critic/ writer, I have been keeping a private collection of my earlier writings that have never been published online. These unpublished reviews and musings will be the starting point of ReviewPERTH.