WHISKEY TJUKANGKU : STATION TO STATION

Mossenson Galleries
41 Derby Street
Collingwood, Victoria Australia
www.mossensongalleries.com.au

1 – 25 February 2012

As a young boy, Whiskey Tjukangku was unable to pronounce his own Aboriginal name. So, on a walking trip to Tyrone Downs Station, his friend Eric bestowed him the name ‘Whiskey’ after a camel that he owned.

Like many of his fellow artists at Iwantja Arts, Whiskey Tjukangku’s paintings, rich in texture and natural earth tones, chart the country of Indulkana. Tjukangku is leading the rise of an exciting new branch to the art movement out of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands of South Australia.

Born in 1939 to parents of Unamata and Urdanga country, Tjukangku grew up in Ernabella and De Rose Hill, two of many small communities located off the Stuart Highway, just south of the Northern Territory and South Australian border. As a bush boy, he spent much of his formative years mustering cattle and working horses on stations across the country, such as the great Todmorden Station and those owned by ‘Ironbark’ Jim Davey. These stations were known for driving huge heads of cattle between the Oodnadatta and Granite Downs (Indulkana) regions, where Tjukangku still resides today.

Through his lyrical, freeform paintings, laden with waterholes, rock-holes and scorched, fallen trees, one begins to understand Tjukangku’s complete knowledge of this capacious land. It is a knowledge borne through decades of walking, learning and committing the terrain to mind.

His recent works, dense in both content and mark-making, identify themselves through strong, linear strokes from which barbed-like forms protrude. They recall his time spent working in Arrernte country, Central Australia, before the ties to the familiar APY lands became overwhelming, motivating his return.

These paintings signify a slight departure from those of previous years. A singular circle motif representing a waterhole acts as a central point from which broad lines extend to the outer edges of the canvas. Allegorically, this central motif denotes Tjukangku’s home. The intricate web of paths are recollections of his journeys to and from this particular place and illustrate a very personal account of a stockman’s connection to country.

During the 1990s Tjukangku and Alec Baker became the first ‘art men’ of Iwantja, a community arts organization that had, up until that time, focused on craft-based activities. The centre soon became known for its printmaking through Tjukangku and Baker’s innovative linocuts. Nowadays, as an original member and elder of the community, Tjukangku continues to encouraged the younger generation of Iwantja men and women to develop their artistic practices. In recent times Iwantja Arts has caught the attention of major institutions and collectors alike. Tjukangku’s works have been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank, Berndt Museum of Anthropology and Charles Darwin University collections.

Images courtesy of the artist and Mossenson Galleries.

Langford120
120 Langford Street
North Melbourne, Victoria Australia
www.blackartprojects.com.au

4 – 13 November 2011

Giles Alexander • Justin Andrews • Steven Asquith • Justin Balmain • Irene Barberis • Magda Cebokli • Mauro Ceolin • Tony Cran • Adam Cullen • Steve Danzig • Fernando do Campo • Ghostpatrol + Miso • Craig Gough • Sharon Green • Lucas Grogan • Brad Haylock + Kieran Stewart • Pernille Kløvedal Helweg • Sarah Hendy • Maria Ionico • Jasper Knight • Emma Langridge • Sam Leach • Littlewhitehead • Brendan Monroe • Yoshitomo Nara • Ka-chun Ng • Niels Oeltjen • Tom O’Hern • Nana Ohnesorge • Andre Piguet • Matthew Sleeth • Jeffrey Smart • Tai Snaith • Wendy Stavrianos • Kate Stevens • Nessie Stonebridge • Wilma Tabacco • Paul Alexander Thornton • Damon Tong • Daniel Truscott • Vexta • Peter Walsh • Mark Whalen • Sean Whelan • Oscar Yanez • Timothy Zauho

An exhibition of this magnitude is certainly ambitious. Some would say, and have said already, that it is ambitious beyond reason. 100 evolved as a project over the past 12 months from an idea concocted between myself, co-director Andrea Candiani and an artist. It was proposed that the artist produce 100 drawings for a single exhibition. The result however, brings together a body of works that spans four continents, includes over 50 artists and covers a multitude of materials, themes, practices and presentational devices.

100, by and large, is a project that challenges the notion of ‘drawing’ by staging an exhibition of works that engage the act of drawing in relation to facets of perception, process and the capacity for individual invention. It seeks to encourage discussion about the relevance and transformation of drawing in contemporary art practices.

Interestingly, the most stirring commentary on drawing I have read in recent times was found in a book on an artist most known for his large steel sculptures, Richard Serra.

In Richard Serra’s dynamic formulation, drawing is perceptual, experiential, and conceptual; it is a way to see, feel, and think. From the emergence of drawing as an autonomous art form in the late 1960s to its continuing relevance today as an important means of making in contemporary art, Serra’s approach has significantly contributed to shaping drawing after modernism, a contribution whose influence lies most critically in the way in which the artist goes against many of drawing’s most recognised conventions. While Serra’s works challenge the traditional definition of the medium as a set of figurative lines or marks on a piece of paper that are intended to represent something else, they also support the fundamental role of drawing as a basic, if not primal and intimate, mode of expression. Rather, it is about creating tension within the conventions of drawing and pushing the parameters of the language that we use to physically, and perceptually, understand drawing.[i]

The artists involved in 100 have not been limited by traditional conventions, media or size in realising artworks for the exhibition. Like Serra, they have utilised the foundations of drawing as a medium to expand the structure of their own practice, invariably actuating and enriching our understanding of this fundamental art form.

David Hagger
Blackartprojects, 2011

ZAI KUANG : THE REALITY OF SILENCE

Mossenson Galleries
41 Derby Street
Collingwood, Victoria Australia
www.mossensongalleries.com.au

28 September – 20 October 2011

Many leading Australian artists have certainly found comfort in the realist genre. A quick glance over Australian art history reveals a penchant for the still life, portrait and landscape as subject. In fact, one would be hard pressed to think of a time where Realism fell out of fashion here. The majority of the country’s significant art prizes seemingly are geared towards realist painters.

Realism first emerged in France in the 19th century through the decline of Romanticism. Artists of the time sought to distance themselves from the non-representational and attempted to portray their observations of contemporary life in a literal manner. It was a new movement, independent in its objective representation of subjects that had, until that time, been considered undeserving for the fine arts.

In the first half of the 20th century, Social Realism further strengthened the idea that everyday activities of ordinary people were indeed critical subjects for art, presenting them (the working class and poor) as they existed. It advocated the need to repudiate any beautiful, physical or emotional aspects brought about by embellishment and guises. True beauty could be found in the banality of life. Whilst it was a relatively short-lived movement, traces of its principals still resonate amongst contemporary artists today.

Zai Kuang has been painting suburban domestic scenes, portraits and still life since immigrating to Australia from China post Cultural Revolution. His depiction of young girls in particular has led to his selection in the 2007 and 2008 Archibald Prizes and the 2007, 2009 and 2010 Doug Moran Portrait Prizes. He is one amongst many working in the realist genre, but his method sets him apart from those whose efforts appear trite and over worked.

Where a traditional still life may include a concoction of bowls, vases, fruit or flowers, Kuang’s Basic Food is reduced to only two elements – a bag of flour and the tabletop onto which it spills. There are no utensils, not even a measuring cup, in sight. He has removed any notion of food preparation. Devoid of context, the painting has become a portrait of sorts, imploring us to draw out the ‘real’ character of the bag and its purpose for being there.

Recognisable through its graphic design, despite us being spared of the corporate identity, Kuang makes no mistake in presenting this flour bag as the most affordable ‘home’ brand item. Without superfluous decoration he depersonalises the subject, skewing the paradigm of association. This is a modest painting of a ‘basic food’ – a basic need. It is the antithesis of glorification.

As with all of his works, what not to include is just as important as what to include. He is not interested in copying reality at all, so his paintings are not besieged with detail. Instead, he discloses only what is necessary, true and accurate, to build his narrative.

Home, a small diptych, brings together two worlds within the one image. The lower panel is occupied by a backyard fence and lawn. A garden hose, guided from the tap by a cast iron frog holder, sweeps out of the frame in a gentle arc. The fence line spans the entire top edge of the canvas. The upper panel reveals a pale grey-blue sky. Under its weightlessness we see only treetops and a minor portion of the neighbour’s corrugated tin roof. It is enough, however, to suggest there is something beyond.

That a simple backyard fence, a barrier between private lands, becomes the most dominant feature of painting indicates the intimacy of the world into which we gaze. As separate panels, each would expose very individual places open for interpretation. There wouldn’t be a greater sense of location. Coupled however, they present an austere view of middle suburbia in a moment of reflection, still, as if caught from the kitchen window.

Kuang has refined his colour palette through the use of muted hues, subtle highlights and atmospheric haze. He work is reminiscent of the great Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890- 1964) in the continuing investigation of the transient effect of light upon his subjects. In Sleeping Girl III we immediately deduce the time to be mid afternoon, not just through warm light falling across the young girl’s face as it rests on the arm of a couch, but also through her school blazer. We have caught her soon after returning home from a busy day, exhausted and in need of respite. Like his still life paintings, this is a brief and unashamedly personal moment.

Kuang places a great deal of energy into the medium itself. His variation in texture tells us that his he thinks beyond simple representation. His brushwork shows an artist keen to capture his subject without it being overworked.

Notwithstanding the commonplace nature of domestic scenes, Zai Kuang’s works are anything but hackneyed. Through their silence and sentiment we find familiarity. The works may appear to fit the canon of a realist bent, but in their simplicity we find that Kuang is an acute observer searching for a purity of form, much the way abstractionists have since the turn of the 20th century.

Images courtesy of the artist and Mossenson Galleries.

TIGER YALTANGKI : THE FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION

Mossenson Galleries
41 Derby Street
Collingwood, Victoria Australia
www.mossensongalleries.com.au

31 August – 24 September 2011

 
On a typically clear and sunny day in Indulkana, South Australia, almost two years ago, a young man shyly entered the art centre to ask if he could paint his hat. At first he was turned away – paint is reserved only for working artists. Following repeated attempts, the art centre coordinators asked the young man if he would like to paint a picture instead. The resulting work made it immediately clear that they had an artist in the making. Tiger Yaltangki is now viewed as one of the exciting emerging artists working in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands of South Australia.

For Tiger Yaltangki, this newfound vocation in the arts has been a salvation from uncertain employment opportunities. Yaltangki has an acquired brain injury from petrol sniffing as a teenager, a major problem in many Indigenous communities of Australia. However it has not impaired his talent and creativity.  His endearing personality makes him a well-loved participant in art centre activities happily playing the joker amongst his peers and colleagues, often singing and entertaining them into fits of laughter.

Whiskey Tjukangku and Alec Baker, the first ‘art men’ of Iwantja, have encouraged the younger generation of Iwantja men and women to develop their artistic practices. While a number of them work alongside these two elders, Yaltangki chooses to paint alone. Commendably, at this impressionable stage of his career, he has chosen to let his style develop unaffected by the observation of other artist’s work.

Yaltangki’s art practice brings a rawness that is both thrilling and startling. His paintings are as bold as his character, wild in subject and appearance. He takes delight in colours that jar in the presence of one another. A recent series shows a sensitivity that goes beyond the high impact, complementary hues and into a palette of muted yellows, greens, blues and greys. Subtle shifts in colour come about through a veil of dotting. This deft exploration of tonal values reveals a sound execution of split complimentary, triad, and tetrad sections of the colour wheel. This is most extraordinary, given he has had no tutelage or schooling in this area. It indicates a mind driven by the response to that which is playing out before him, immediate and true. It reaches further than a simple trial and error methodology and demonstrates the instinctual nature of his means for invoking sensation through his imagery.

Using simple bands of flat colour, gestural strokes, and truncated detail, Yaltankgi delivers organic forms that are symbolic of the creeks, water and rockholes found in his country. As a hunter and gatherer, he passes through the Apu Hills that surround Indulkana, collecting punu (wood) and mai wiru (good food) along the way. These hills feature heavily amongst his aerial landscapes, often flanking the edges of the canvas and containing within them significant sites of the area. Not only is he commanding and ambitious in his interpretation of this land, but considered in his approach to the great creation stories held within these hills.

At the end of every day, Yaltangki takes home a small pot of paint to recolour his now famous and heavily loaded cowboy hat. One wonders whether this small gesture, a reward of sorts, is the impetus for him returning each day or simply an act of joy carried out in his true, full of life character.

If we look back on that day nearly two years ago, when Yaltangki asked for a simple share of paint, one never could have guessed what would unfold – not even Yaltangki himself.

JASON CORDERO : BEING HERE

Mossenson Galleries
41 Derby Street
Collingwood, Victoria Australia
www.mossensongalleries.com.au

27 July – 20 August 2011

The Ascendant Abyss, oil on linen, 101 x 52 cm

For mountaineers, reaching the highest summit is a quest of incessant hunger. They return to climb the same peaks again to conquer the seemingly insurmountable, both physically and emotionally. The prize lies not only in the vantage point from where they can cast their eye over the vast horizon of the Earth, but in the sense of achievement of pushing their body and mind to the limit. The summit is the ultimate frontier – a place where one can’t be any higher, at least not standing with both feet planted on the ground.

In the paintings of Jason Cordero we reach the summit without having to endure the gruelling path that guides us there. In fact, there is no trace of a path at all. It has vanished, leading us to believe that we are discovering that which lies ahead. Like a cartographer, Cordero maps out his panoramas as unchartered lands. Eugene von Guerard painted grandiose landscapes conquered by man, often with the figure present. Cordero on the other hand, goes to great lengths to exclude any signs of human presence.

As clouds break, sunlight envelops the surface of the Earth, searing it with midday heat. The water glistens under its rays. Treetops are lit up like street lamps. We are reminded yet again that time passes. The light will not last, darkness will fall and the rains will eventually come.

Cordero places us amongst the wilderness of the Australian landscape, although one can never find an exact point of reference. Remote, vast, and at times unforgiving, his paintings are not representative of any one place, but rather the manifestation of an inner world. They are wonderlands of majestic countryside that are not easily reached but offer high reward for those who venture within.

Cordero is a storyteller. His paintings transcend the physicality of the landscape. They befit the human psyche, laden with expectation, enlightenment, tyranny and despair. His skies are never empty. Clouds bear the weight of passing time. Without them, the land below would appear torpid and the image would be too pictorial. They bring with them a familiarity and poignant context – a consciousness if you will.

Cordero describes the process of painting “…like making a model – only of an emotive state rather than an actual place.”[i] This corporeal position stands him aside from the archetypal Australian landscape painter and aligns him to the resurgence of Romanticism in Australia today. With a disposition for melancholic yearning, for communion with nature and for the sublime[ii], Cordero achieves far more than the perfunctory illustration of an existing site.

Despite the striking paradigms driving his work, Cordero revels in Australia’s diverse scenery and is faithful to its make-up. He does not arrive at his works by chance. Nor are they wholly the product of a vivid imagination. He is the adventurer within us and offers us the reward of his travels. Trekking for days at a time, and often through treacherous conditions, he finds landmarks suitable enough to be subjects for reinterpretation. Better still, we are offered his journeys through the toil of his mind and hands, not just his feet, for it is in his studio that these imposing landscapes are created.

His works leave us asking where and when have I been there before? The answer is resolute. We have been there before. We have traversed the emotional landscape that these images speak of at one time or another, and it is highly likely that we will return.

I Haven’t Looked There, oil on linen, 56 x 101 cm

The Descended Sky, oil on linen, 102 x 198 cm

In 2010, Jason Cordero won the John Leslie Art Prize. The judges praised The Pillars of Wind as “a masterful painting, exhibiting a magnificent technique. [It] brings out the extremities of nature, and makes us wonder whether there are still places like this left on the planet. It encompasses the sublime and a heightened theatricality, while blurring the distinction between reality and the imagination.”[iii] Cordero has been a finalist in numerous national landscape prizes in the past decade, winning the Heysen Prize in 2006 and 3^rd Prize for Painting in The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize in 2008. He has also won Viewers Choice for the Fleurieu (2008) Glover (2007), and Heysen (2007 & 2005) Prizes.

Text and images copyright the artist, author and Mossenson Galleries

MARK WHALEN (KILL PIXIE) : WHITE OUT

Blackartprojects
The Madman Void
Collingwood, Victoria Australia
www.blackartprojects.com.au

1 – 17 April 2011

In recent years, Mark Whalen has used an axonometric grid as a foundation on which to engineer paintings that are, at once, psychedelic visions of our past lives and a revelatory demonstration of what is yet to come.

This grid is central to his practice as it removes any familiar context from which we find our bearings. His works often appear bigger than us in spirit, yet through their diminutive scale and fine detail, we peer into them as miniature dioramas.

Whalen’s characters are confined within micro worlds laden with sex, religion, race, and violence. They play out scenes that titillate and torture with reckless abandon. At times there is no distinction between floor, ceiling and wall – each being congruent with activity and without gravitational pull. These worlds are, quite literally, on the brink of being turned upside down.

That is not to say Whalen doesn’t impart his distinctive humour throughout his artworks. It is not all doom and gloom, fantasy and fanfare. Whalen revels in the absurd and his paintings and sculptures are as much whimsical as they are worldly, and often tongue in cheek. His palette alone delivers a wry comment on the very nature of society’s willingness to categorise each other; the great divide of girl and boy, pink and blue.

Now living and working in Los Angeles, Whalen’s practice is a far cry from his early years in Sydney where he was recognised for his large-scale graffiti works. Yet his indomitable spirit of creativity and resistance fractures and realigns old divides between street and gallery, and reinterprets the universal human struggle for freedom and control in a world that he sees as being bent on self-destruction.

Since 2006, Whalen’s work has been shown in a constant stream of exhibitions in Los Angeles, London, Berlin, and Australia. He was included in 2009’s Apocalypse Wow! exhibition at MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome and more recently SPACE INVADERS at the National Gallery of Australia.

He has appeared in numerous publications such as Juxtapoz, Modart Europe, Arkitip, Nylon, Artist Profile, Australian Art Collector and Monster Children.

In 2008, Mark Whalen was awarded the Sydney Music, Arts & Culture Award for best visual artist, and in 2009 he was named in the top 100 Creative Catalysts by the Creative Sydney Festival. His work is held in the National Gallery of Australia and Artbank collections.

For the past eight years the theme of the city has featured prominently in the work of Damon Kowarsky.

This is no surprise.

Most of us live in urban environments. In fact for the first time in history more than half the world’s population lives in cities and towns, and the number is expected to rise in coming decades[1].

For Kowarsky the city excites because of its collective and universal character and the great variety of its forms. These range from mud brick to steel but as all serve similar functions [to house us!] there are similarities despite the otherwise enormous differences in language and culture.

Thus friends in Pakistan commented that etchings of Mexico City reminded them of Lahore, and of memories of “sleeping outdoors on the roof on hot summer nights, wishing upon shooting stars and storytelling.”[2]

Kowarsky says, “it is these connections that interest me as much as the unique characteristics of each place – the local and the universal, the timeless and the specific.”

“Over time my interest in the city has changed. What began with images of traditional mud brick and stone housing inspired by travels in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia has moved steadily towards the modern metropolis and a technological future. Influences including Japanese anime and films like Bladerunner have found a place in my work. This progression is partly the result of practice. The modern city is complicated and requires patience and drawing skills I did not possess five years ago. It is also prompted by a desire to explore all areas of our architectural and urban environment. There is much that is unique and wondrous in the old but what we build today has many of the same qualities – if only we take the time to stop and look.”[3]

Yet if the reasons we live in cities – love, work, friendship, family, education, opportunity, escape – are clear so too is the paradox that lies at the heart of urban living.

The Pakistani writer and art historian Quddus Mirza writes that “displacement is the main theme for the artist who is living away from his home”[4], as it is for “a number of people in the metropolises today … who have moved from their homelands.”[5]

“The social setup of big cities – with minimum personal contact and huge crowds of unknown people swarming in the shopping malls, streets, parks and other urban places – aggravates the feeling of loneliness.

“In that sense, man rediscovers his self both in connection and confrontation with the city. [The] city assumes a great significance in the psyche of a citizen who perceives it as a combination of structures that are unknown, uninviting and unbearable. Perhaps, for him, roaming in the city is an experience not much dissimilar from moving in a desert, since in both places one tends to lose the sense of direction and gets an illusion of being lost.”[6]

Mirza is not the first to draw links between the city and the desert. Francis Bacon [1561-1626] wrote “Magna civitas, magna solitude“ [A great city, a great desert], making clear the parallels between these places. While Bacon insists that “in a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship… which is in less neighborhoods”[7] for Kowarsky this is not always true.

“Cairo is one of those places where anything can happen, and where it is possible with patience and a smile to slip behind the scenes into a world that is exotic and full of surprises. After graduating from university I was determined to go back and so volunteered as an archaeological illustrator at Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt’s western desert. This lead to residencies at Townhouse Gallery in 2003 and 2009 and an ongoing love of the city and its people.

“Each time I go back it seems there is more to discover. On my last visit I spent days exploring 600 year old mosques, the crumbling ruins of a Mamluk hospital and the recently [and very beautifully] restored Darb al Ahmar district. The Agha Khan Foundation is doing amazing work both with the restoration and the social development of the surrounding neighbourhood.

“But the best and most wonderful thing about Cairo are the people. Friendly, hospitable, and always ready to share stories and a cup of tea. When I visited a favourite restaurant in Souq Tawfiqia the waiter looked at his watch and said ‘Four years’. And he was right. There are not many cities of 20 million where you will be greeted so warmly after being away so long.”[8]

The work in the exhibition In Visible Cities is based on Kowarsky’s time in Cairo, visits to cities including Damascus, Chicago, New York, and of course his home town of Melbourne, Australia.

By bringing together images of these cities – old and new, familiar and completely unknown – Kowarsky shows both the links that bind these places and the distinctive details that mark them as their own.

David Hagger, March 2011

David Hagger is a Melbourne based writer and curator. His projects can be seen online at
www.blackartprojects.com.au

Bag Opinion

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Issue No.1, September 2010
Melbourne, Australia
artist book (ed. of 50)
21.0 x 29.7 cm
ISSN 1838-501X

contributors:
Justin Andrews
Andrew Barber
Stephen Bram
Lars Breuer
Sanne Bruggink
Christoph Dahlhausen
Matthew Deleget
Craig Easton
Anna Finlayson
Sebastian Freytag
Daniel Göttin
Jasper van der Graaf
Melinda Harper
Bianca Hester
Matt Hinkley
Clemens Hollerer
Kyle Jenkins
Gerard Kodde
Anne-Marie May
Guido Münch
John Nixon
Rose Nolan
Jan van der Ploeg
Kerrie Poliness
Sandra Selig
Gemma Smith
Masato Takasaka
David Thomas
Tilman
Peter Tyndall
Jan Maarten Voskuil
Thomas Wildner
Constanze Zikos

An essay by Henry F. Skerritt for the occasion of

COL JORDAN : A PLAY ON WHITE

Mossenson Galleries
41 Derby Street
Collingwood, Victoria Australia
www.mossensongalleries.com.au

5 – 31 October 2010

I was only a small boy when I first visited St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived, and the fading winter light did little to break through the cold Byzantine depths of the cavernous basilica. Near the altar, a lone curate was busily engaged in preparing the evening service. Noticing us enter the transept, he gestured enthusiastically towards the heavens, before scurrying out of sight. All of a sudden, the building was lit up – the darkness expelled by the glittering brilliance of the basilica’s golden ceilings. Above our heads, Adam and Eve circled in an endless repetition of humanity’s Fall, while higher still, a bearded Heavenly Father separated the heavens from the earth, the land from the sea, and the darkness from the light. It was like a divine evocation of the curate’s act in switching on the electric lights. With our mouths agape, we became one with the million shimmering tesserae, subsumed into the vision unfolding above us – like each tile, we gave up our individuality to partake of the majestic unity of the divine order.

Col Jordan refers to his latest series of paintings as ‘The Mosaic Paintings’, but they are not mosaics in any traditional sense. Over the past four decades, Jordan has established himself as one of Australia’s foremost practitioners of hard-edge, optical abstraction, finding in it an unceasingly fertile ground for artistic experimentation and conceptual exploration. In his latest works, an overlapping selection of geometric shapes jostle for position across the white ground of the canvas, fragmented and unified by the interplay of different patterns. Jordan is a master of visual impact; high-keyed colours are offset against a ground of crisp white, giving the works an impressive bombast similar to the ceilings of St Mark’s.

However, Jordan is not a religious man, and his Mosaic Paintings must be seen in a very different conceptual light to those of his religious precursors. In the mosaics of St Mark’s, the individuality of each tessera is willingly conceded to the whole – a metaphor for the believer’s role in the divine hierarchy – but Jordan’s works have none of this spiritual certainty. In fact, throughout his entire career, Jordan has relentlessly explored the boundaries of paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty. In the dynamic tensions of the picture plane, Jordan draws attention to the entirely subjective nature of vision. His paintings are, in his own words, “celebrations of the infinite variability and unpredictability of the human condition”. This exploration of paradox has reached a new zenith in Jordan’s Mosaic Paintings.

In order to understand the height of this achievement, however, it is worth returning to a work he completed in 1968, Daedalus Series 6, which was exhibited in the landmark exhibition The Field and is now held in the National Gallery of Australia. In 1971, Bernard Smith praised the visual tension of the work, noting that “the tyranny of the frame as structural determinant is challenged increasingly the greater the distance from the edge, as forms and shapes arise which assert a kind of plastic freedom.” Arriving in the late 1960s, when Australian society was being reconfigured as a multicultural panoply, this conscious evocation of visual subjectivity seemed a perfect metaphor for the new, postmodern subject, which was constructed, as Chantal Mouffe has suggested, “at the point of intersection of a multiplicity of subject positions”. Indeed, in 1969, Jordan confirmed the suggestion, drawing a link between pictorial complexity and this changing sense of society and selfhood:

My paintings are about paradox. Visual embodiments of literal impossibility. A work is good to the extent that it reconciles irreconcilables. Daedalus is about directions, tied down and boxed by the stripes of its own identity.

In these stripe paintings of the 1960s and 70s, Jordan set up a tension between the unifying factor of the frame and the individuality of the coloured lines. In a sense, this is the exact opposite to the unifying of tesserae into a single image that occurs in traditional mosaics. And yet, both conceptually and visually, this strategy has its limitations. For Jordan’s paintings are not simply celebrations of unfettered individualism – rather, at their heart they recognise the need to create a “unified visual statement.” They should be seen as explorations of the delicate balance of individuality and community needed to create a democracy of vision.

In this sense, Jordan’s paintings must be considered as paintings of their time. For if, on first viewing, the Mosaic Paintings appear to present a cacophony of individual voices – each shape jostling for dominance – slowly, under Jordan’s skilful hand, they unite beautifully. The artist presents the cacophony of community: a dynamic harmony forged from many voices, as in musical counterpoint. Unlike the Daedalus series, where individuality was bound by the tyranny of the frame, in the Mosaic paintings the picture plane is burst open, threatening the unity of the image. However, under Jordan’s direction, a profuse joy emerges from this confusion. From the many unfettered voices comes a vision not of tyrannically bound unity, but of participatory community.

Jordan’s Mosaic Paintings are extraordinarily complex works, and they do not attempt to suggest that this sense of unity is easily achieved. In a world in which ethnic tensions and religious extremism threaten the stability of communities around the world, these paintings recognise the grand complexity of our epoch. Jordan’s paintings ask us to visualise the hardest paradox of all: how a seemingly chaotic jumble of individual entities can combine to make a world of poetry and beauty.

- Henry Skerritt
For further information visit or contact the gallery at
41 Derby Street, Collingwood Victoria 3066
T: + 61 3 9417 6694
F: + 61 3 9417 2114
E: collingwood@mossensongalleries.com.au
W: www.mossensongalleries.com.au