In the air

Site © Ryan Daffurn (Oil on linen)

Daffurn and Sagrera hold their breath in the space that widens in their paintings. Daffurn’s paintings mutate and multiply as if from within—as if themselves living creatures—with sinewy, bulbous forms expanding by his own imaginative logic, according to his alert response to the physical world. Sagrera’s paintings echo with an eerie stillness, the flat but pocked surfaces jutting abrasively into each other as he focuses on the straight lines that fragment his view. But both painters linger in the space they construct, space heavy with the presence of troubled souls, and this ominous space unites them.

Before building a door © Carlos Sagrera (Acrylic on canvas, Caldic Collection)

Sagrera’s souls are departed, only their breath hanging in the recently disrupted air. Though his interiors hold together as convincing representations, they feel torn at the seams: walls align but don’t quite seem fixed, as though they belong to different and disordered moments. We only find traces of our fellow humans in the trails of wear they leave on ageing surfaces, in the weak hope of their return. We try to piece together their stories through the fragments left to us, but the stories are as fractured as the space. It is the inorganic matter that survives and that speaks for us. Our presence is recorded in its stark geometry.

Crowning © Ryan Daffurn (Oil on linen)

We face ourselves torn open in Daffurn’s paintings, stripped of our skin and grating against the rugged earth out of which we emerged. We face our humanity as broken, distorted, inconsequent in his cruel cropping that isolates limbs or removes them. And yet, the human body is the source, the vital organ that galvanises his work. The body pulses with our private hungers and fears; our firm, strong, blood-swollen flesh writhes with the hurt and desire of existence. The very rocks that cradle our mortal forms seem fused with our beating hearts; the rolling earth and monstrous trees seem an extension of our wretched human writhings. We try to shape the earth, we push and pull at it with all our strength, but we must face the fact that we are inseparable from it. That catastrophic realisation is always hanging heavily in the air, the moment ever about to burst.

Painting the bathroom © Carlos Sagrera (Acrylic on canvas, Winter Vandenbrink)

Violent colours accost us, each painter subjecting them to light of very different qualities. Daffurn’s are fierce and augmented, making the very air tingle. His light is strong and coloured with a personality of its own, his shadows reverberating back just as fiercely. Sagrera’s colours are set under a more natural light, showing up the dirt and the gritty surfaces. He turns his sober light on the decay we leave in our wake; the neutral shadows that inhabit grazed walls drench everything in a deep sadness. For each, the light is honestly probed, systematically calculated, and cuts through the air that carves out convincing space.

Whitewash © Ryan Daffurn (Oil on linen)

From opposing positions and with different intent, Sagrera and Daffurn draw us into disquieted spaces heavy with the drama and responsibility and yet the inconsequentiality of human presence.

Double © Carlos Sagrera (Acrylic on canvas)

 

PROBED LIGHT
DAFFURN / SAGRERA

Vernissage
25.05.2016 | 18:00

KTR Galerie / activeART Showroom
Tschaikowskistr. 21
04105 Leipzig

Ausstellungsdauer:
26.05. – 13.07.2016
immer Freitags 15°°- 19°°
Samstag (28.5. / 18.6. / 9.7.) 14°°-18°°
und nach Vereinbarung: 0341 – 22 30 24 01

Since paintings are to be looked at

Paintings are to be looked at, and their reality in paint is an inextricable part of their being looked at—far different from their representation on screen—and so, last month Ryan Daffurn, Adolphe Piche and I banded together to exhibit some recent paintings. Since coming back to Brisbane in April, I’ve shared an artist’s residency with Ryan at the Sculptors Queensland shed at the back of the Old Museum in Bowen Hills, where Adolphe had likewise spent some time. Our show, held in the Museum itself—a grand red-brick, art deco construction set amongst lush, flowering gardens and palm trees—commemorated our time with Sculptors Queensland and displayed the fruits of our labours.

The arched foyer of the Old Museum quickly filled with a flood of people, and showing in Brisbane proved a surprising experience. I was reacquainted with people I hadn’t seen in five, seven years, people from many parts of my life, from café jobs and university, even my philosophy honours supervisor. It was a great big soup of my past and present lives, and it was really thrilling to stand behind my work and have something to present for the intervening years. Yes, I’ve been busy.

It’s always surprising to hear people’s response to your work. I rather apprehensively showed a self-portrait whose slow and painful birth produced an intense and dark painting, with crudely designed shapes for arms, with thickly-built-up hands that betrayed a long battle with planes and forms, and with a face perhaps among the most painterly-mature I’ve painted, certainly not effortless, but with a firmer control of paint, bearing a harsh expression (my very involved painting-face). And despite my reservations, it was well received, and people were even disappointed not to be able to take home prints of it.

Since paintings are to be looked at, and since we would prefer them not to be seen as luxury commodities, we freely offered hundreds of postcard prints of our best works. It’s nice to offer a memento, to permit a little piece to be taken home, to implant a memory of the night and of the work in someone’s mind.

I was surprised to learn that many people—even those familiar with my work—consider me more of a writer than a painter. This is a dire new predicament in which I find myself. Though writing is undeniably important to me, and something I intend to pursue in a very serious manner, I think of myself first of all as a painter. I don’t consider my writing journalistic, but more philosophical and more about exposing the contents of a painter’s mind. Perhaps I’ve steered off course somehow, or let my writing—a skill I’ve had greater opportunity to flex—do more of the work than my drawing and painting. I feel that I might need to rest the writing a little more in deference to more painting and drawing, and that I might need to push a more visual presence on the internet. Certainly, it is important to write, and as Joshua Reynolds (1997: 167), himself a very adept painter, wrote: ‘The knowledge which an Artist has of his subject will more than compensate for any want of elegance in the manner of treating it, or even of perspicuity, which is still more essential; and I am convinced that one short essay written by a Painter, will contribute more to advance the theory of our art, than a thousand volumes such as we sometimes see.’ But it is good to have an opportunity to reflect on how you are publicly perceived, and to seize the opportunity to modify that perception.

It was incredible to show with two painters I very much look up to, and to be raised up next to them. My work isn’t as strong or as complex as theirs, but I am, after all, a few years behind in terms of experience. And yet, they consider my work respectable company, and I relished the challenge of standing proudly in the shadow of people greater than me.

The artist, so long hidden in her painter-cave, mixing pigments and scrutinising the fall of light across still and silent objects, must also be a very public creature, and must thrust the efforts of her labours on the outside world as regularly as she can. Our quiet diligence is rewarded with bursts of stardom, and the act of putting on a show is both a celebration and a very important feedback loop. Seeds of new ideas have lodged themselves in my brain, and I feel more certain of my course.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua. 1997. Discourses on art. Ed. Robert R Wark. Yale: New Haven.

The storyteller

Dr Rhyl Hinwood, drawn from life

Dr Rhyl Hinwood is a part of the fabric of Brisbane. Her work wove through my life well before I heard her name; her social spirit created Brisbane institutions that have profoundly shaped my life. Eminently at home here, and deeply invested in our sprawling, sun-drenched city, her life’s work exists not just in the immovable sandstone she carves with her gnarled hands, but also in the people of Brisbane. For while Rhyl loves to shape stone, and her hands have formed memorable parts of the city’s surface, she cares just as deeply about shaping less tangible things.

Steele building, University of Queensland

I learned this when Rhyl and her husband Rob welcomed Ryan and me into the home they built with their own hands some fifty years hence, Ryan eager to paint her portrait. The house is full of personality, and full of Australia. The sloped wooden roof hangs high above the tiled terracotta floor, and the space in between is decked with gumnuts, dried leaves, wicker chairs, exuberantly patterned fabrics and rugs in earthy colours and, of course, endless bronzes. A carved wooden cabinet houses the radio which plays classical music as we work, and on top sit a glowing cluster of green-bronze busts—mostly the heads of Rhyl’s grandchildren, and one of her mother. Frog bronzes pipe at flutes and saxophones as though an Australian rainforest bacchanal procession were coursing through the house.

Dr Rhyl Hinwood (from life); copy after her sculpture

Rhyl is possibly best known for her work at the University of Queensland, where I studied, where she got her break carving grotesques for the central quadrangle, the Great Court. This was the beginning of a continuing relationship with the university, with the various colleges commissioning large sandstone works from her to this day, and, of course, the Wordsmiths Café (where I served many a coffee) and its snaking literary tribute to Australian authors. Rhyl assumes her position on the couch for Ryan’s portrait and talks about her recent visit to St Leo’s college, whose gate she recently produced, and where she was subsequently invited to attend a formal dinner and see all the boys suited up for an opera performance. Her attendance is always welcome, and she always follows through—being present, she advises us, is always a good strategy. When you are out in the community, being seen, meeting people, things come up, work comes in. She brims with stories of concerts, Great Court races, bumping into the now fully-grown son of a man she met while carving at UQ decades ago; the governor taking a liking to her and wanting to chat endlessly; the lovely but reserved Canadian woman she met and introduced to university dignitaries with the ease of an equal; the English reverend who saw her working in the Great Court and who invited her to stay with him in England in the very town where she was coincidentally going to work on a church. Rhyl excels because she is endlessly open and interested in her fellow human beings.

Wordsmiths Cafe, University of Queensland

Rhyl is a storyteller, and at heart, her art form, public sculpture, is about collecting, distilling and preserving stories. Her frankness and clarity are indispensable in this matter. One afternoon we tramp down into the backyard to see some of her works in progress, and her storytelling weaves effortlessly in and out of the imagery. A huge concrete semi-circle bounds her outdoor carving area, a moveable crane fixed to the top, and a starfish adorns it. Heavy power tools rest nearby. Rhyl is working on an arced piece with a little saint, and Ryan’s narrow face is her inspiration for the character—she would hate for her sculptures to be peopled with generic forms. We follow her down a little path through the rainforest garden to the studio. It is a multi-level affair, wooden, again with a dramatically sloping roof. She shows us some plates she is preparing for bronzes, an amalgam of wood and plastic. She traces the elements of each one with her hands, explaining the stories through simple yet eloquent symbols.

Wordsmiths Cafe, University of Queensland

Over several weeks we sat by her fireplace (flanked in sandstone, decked in coral, shells and urns full of banksias and gumnuts), painted and drew, and shared meals. Her husband, Rob, once in the army, but also a builder and a leather worker and ceramicist, chimed in with jokes and stories, and as the weeks went by, their stories built up a tapestry of their rich and social lives, their children, their travels, their work, their Brisbane. Rhyl’s parents had a house by Yerongpilly, and Sunday afternoons when she was young they would open their doors to Asian students, and together they would spend the evening dining and dancing on the veranda. She and her parents fundraised to construct International House at the University of Queensland, a residential college that operated on the same welcoming principle (‘that brotherhood may prevail’), the residential college I myself called home for two years and through which I made many lasting friendships that span the globe.

Forgan Smith building, University of Queensland

Paring a story back to the core elements requires much conversation, and asking many questions. Rhyl recalled seeing the austere slogan above the Forgan Smith building at UQ, home to my beloved philosophy department: ‘GREAT IS TRUTH AND MIGHTY ABOVE ALL THINGS,’ and resolving to work around this proclamation. She asked many professors, ‘Do you think that truth is the purpose of the university?’ and was met with a resounding no. After much conversation and deliberation, she determined that the university must, in fact, stand for knowledge: the uncovering of, collecting of, and preserving of. Her research efforts are admirable: she showed us a photograph of a large symbolic piece in the midst of being installed in a college in Sydney. She told us of an ineffectual meeting with all of the stakeholders, in which dominant personalities drove the discussion, and each party felt compelled to have their stamp. Earthy, pragmatic Rhyl simply decided to meet personally with every individual involved, and to give each their chance to speak with her one on one. Having collected every viewpoint, a plan for the piece evolved in her mind, and when she presented it to the group every party was satisfied. There is a profound lesson in this humble, attentive method of collecting stories and compiling them into something fitting and meaningful.

Copies after Rhyl Hinwood

Societies and social events can be very demanding on your time, Rhyl admits, but she urges us to be present in our cities, in our communities. A chance meeting at a symposium, a fortunate conversation over morning tea at Customs House, can open up surprising opportunities. And one suspects that finding one’s place in one’s community and building it over a lifetime comes with rewards far deeper and richer than public commissions. Rhyl Hinwood lives and breathes Brisbane, and can take satisfaction in the knowledge that she and her work are an enduring part of its story.

Wordsmiths Cafe, University of Queensland

Leipzig calling

Bathurst Rhythms © Ryan Daffurn

I have had the unimaginable pleasure of forming a close bond with an incredible painter of my own generation: Ryan Daffurn. I secretly think he is one of the most skilled and genuine painters alive, his age notwithstanding. His work is formidable: the fluent synthesis of years of dedicated study and obsessive practice; his lines are sure and energetic, brimming with life.

I first made his acquaintance at the school he teaches at and co-founded in Brisbane, Australia, where his humble and attentive and famously slow and thorough mode of teaching quietly won me over. It was a long time before he showed me any of his drawings in aid of teaching, and when he brought out an eloquently hatched pencil drawing of a tree, curling off into space in all directions, I was shaken by the descriptive power of his restrained and firmly-placed lines. As a student, you place yourself trustingly in the hands of another, and I fear that too often this trust can be misplaced. When you see your teacher’s own rendering of the task you are battling, and their hand is decisive and elegant, and they present it to you quietly and humbly as but one method of working, little seeds of respect begin to take root.

Ryan is a teacher of great humility, and I am convinced that this is because he sees himself as an eternal student. He would rather listen than instruct. His respect for other painters–living and dead–is unending; his determination to find merit and to learn something from every work he sees is limitless. And when himself without a teacher, he turns to the physical world for instruction, stimulation and challenges. His devotion to his senses energises his work, but his inner world twists it imaginatively. Ryan’s work is idealised, re-envisioned, accentuated—beautiful lies delicately woven together into a seamless fabric. Through his incessant reinterpretation of the natural world—his sketchbook always to hand—I have learned to appreciate that art can be better than life.

If there was a living painter whose powers ought to be recognised, whose path ought to be smoothed, whose labours ought to be supported, Ryan Daffurn is he. The winds of change are calling him to Leipzig, where his hard-won abilities can be inspired afresh and wholly concentrated on his own work.

Ryan has a true reverence for art and its power to move us, describe us and even redefine us. His ambition is somewhat disconnected from popular notions of success: he is intent on doing his utmost to contribute something of real worth and meaning. And in my humble opinion, he is capable of anything.