On Tony Ameneiro @ Sturt Gallery

The Gymea lily, deep scarlet and fleshy atop a defiant spear of stem, has the mark of the Australian bush as fetid hothouse. It pierces the sky as it grows upwards, often twice the height of a grown man, it’s bloody flowers signaling an ancient and untamed biology. Australian artist Tony Ameneiro has been caught in the spell of this singular plant and produced a body of work that returns to it obsessively only to show it anew and give the viewer a sight of something deeper and more personal.

Ameneiro, who works with an equal facility across oils, drawing and multiple printing methods, has found his subject in the lily just as a painter like Giorgio Morandi found his in simple ceramic pots bowls an vases, the repetition of subject allowing him to concentrate on technique, on how different marks made in different media might offer different potential. It’s an intense and true ambition for an artist.

These works take out the extraneous. There are no backgrounds, no foliage, no context just the tightly cropped heads of these alien looking flowers. But the flowers are not the only only heads we see here, as petals can morph into the human. Ameneiro’s echoes og human physiology are more than visual tricks and whilst they might be reminiscent of Arcimboldo’s renaissance fruit salads their pulse and flow never lets them feel contrived.. Instead what we see is an extended meditation on things that are brief and mortal: flowers and human lives.

‘Flowering Head II’ has some of the blur of Seurat but none of the gentleness of pointillist space. The petals writhe like a feeding frenzy of blue and red fish and in doing so seem to form something like pumping and bloody guts. Flowers aren’t supposed to be this visceral but Ameneiro knows that nature isn’t supposed to be polite. That gives him access to a vibrating and messy life force on the paper.

Great printmakers can be taken for granted, they show their art and craft is more than the transposition of drawing to plate. Ameneiro’s success as a printmaker isn’t purely technical, he also has a strong and decisive line that marks can be seen across media, the tension between this and colour or shade is what gives his lilies life whilst making them anything but ‘still’. Here we see that mastery in single colour etchings, stripped back to technique and vision. ‘Gymea Lily Head #2’ crawls off of the paper in a multitude of greys, spits of burnt petal seem to cling to the surface and whorls of texture make the image look like a solarized photograph, something Man Ray may have pulled from the darkroom in shock.

If Ameneiro’s etchings have an earthy mortality his coloured pencil drawings of the same subject are celestial in lightness. These lilies are both dense and weightless. They might have been photographed by the Hubble telescope as they have that delirious colouring, where space dark petals might be enclosing ancient galaxies, and create that same sublime wonder. They do something that touches on a deep romanticism too. These organic wisps of line feel corporeal, almost like James Gleeson’s fleshy clouds whilst always remaining botany. In coming close to a surreal portraiture they remind us of our proximity to nature just as they awe us with its complexity and beauty.

Themes of life and death have long been explored through still life painting and through vegetable matter in particular. There is something that seems to be coalescing in so many of Ameneiro’s images, it isn’t an optical trick rather the feeling that the marks he makes on paper or plate have been wrung and wrestled from a powerful and sentient nature and like nature the images seethe and mutate into and often strange beauty. Tony Ameneiro doesn’t make any didactic claims of intent and that adds to the power of these works, simply by looking and making marks he is finds and makes meaning that never sits still. If art is anything it is the ability to allude to something universal and ineffable through something finite and particular, each time Tony Ameneiro creates another flower he is doing just that.

On The 2010 Archibald Prize @ AGNSW

I tend to take a ‘death and taxes’ view of the Archibald Prize, currently on at Sydney’s AGNSW. Complaining about it seems futile, it’s as inevitable as the tides. As with those other two unfortunate afflictions far better to simply offer advice and succour in an attempt to ameliorate the pain it causes.This time it feels pretty grim, the trends toward giganticism, historical pastiche (although there is ONE good pun to be enjoyed) and splashy sanitized street art are all present an incorrect. Perhaps the fact that they’re so predictable only makes them more depressing, if nothing else the whole exercise makes you question the aesthetic judgement of our present generation of commissioning Medici.

It’s curious to see a portrait show in the age of digital reproduction. The rise of photography did not see the demise of painting but, instead, a move away from the illusionistic realism as such a key criteria of quality. The Impressionists were at work as the first plates of silver oxide were being exposed and they are the first group of artists who we recognise from photographic portraits rather than paintings, yet we accept their work as showing a perceived reality. Thus in the age of chemical and digital reproduction our criteria has changed, we ask for images to reveal rather than show. Photographs must capture a moment, and by moment we mean a frozen frame of time that represents so much more, the same must go for painted portraits where we hope that medium and representation offer something that could never otherwise be produced. That's the criterion used here.

We ought to start on a positive, with the winner, Sam Leach’s portrait of 'Tim Minchin'. Leach paints in the intimate cabinet style of the old Dutch Masters but it is his handling of light, both as subject and in the mirror like surfaces of his paintings that makes him extraordinary rather than the, still significant, precision of his painting. Photo-realism damns Leach with faint praise. That is not to denigrate his desegno and brushwork, his compositions are stunning, he makes the shining void a character in his work and he demonstrates how six hundred years of western art tradition is still relevant. Leach shows us that his miniaturist’s skill offers revelation rather than reproduction. His subjects often look uneasy, perhaps Leach’s method reminds them of the old Dutch vanitas, and brings intimations of mortality and posterity. He seems to capture living people resistant at being caught in his varnished surfaces and in doing so creates something more soulful than clever.

The piece that has stayed with me most persistently is James Money’s portrait of 'The Lord Mayor of Melbourne'. It’s not huge, it’s not flashy but it is beautiful and creates very human spectacle. The slight flattening and the geometric rigidity of the collar and tie give a hint of John Brack, but they also show give a basis for contrast, their formality, both sartorially and aesthetically, opens us the possibility of the big head atop them to appear ever so subtly alive. Money’s technique, where he has scraped away at the surface so it almost appears to be tattooed into the red earth ground, is impeccably matched to the subject. Like Melbourne’s architecture there is a sombre nineteenth century alderman quality to the surface, but you also become aware how smart and stylized it is (again you might remind yourself of John Brack). In every way Money has captured the balance between office holder and human being perfectly.

I would contrast this to some of the other ‘great and good’ portraits here. They range from the merely prosaic like Yang Li’s ‘Bishop Elliot’ or Peter Smeeth’s ‘Peter Fitzsimons’ to, a popular Archibald genre, the comic symbolic. The best representation of the latter here is Alexander McKenzie’s ‘Andrew Upton’ which is as cartoonish and heavy handed as Upton’s translations are cloth eared. If one painting symbolizes that Archibald tendency to wear references heavily but smugly it’s Giles Alexander’s ‘The Alternative Ambassadors (Professors Ross Garnaut and Martin Gree)'. I don’t mind a spot of historical appropriation but this is so witless that it steps into the realms of those pastiche Wild West photos you can dress up for. In picking Holbein’s masterpiece Alexander has taken on a painting full of mystery and replaced it with a series of glib references. It’s a classic ‘secret stupid’ painting, not seeming to understand that there is a difference between using a symbolic system to denote an object or a quality and using a small image of that object itself. I find it difficult to describe just how irritating I found this smug middlebrow mess.

There is always a thread of artists painting one another in the show and at least there are two interesting examples here. Rodney Pople, always refreshingly off kilter, is fairly traditional but darkly seductive in his triptych of Stelarc, the body modifier-cum artist. Pople’s blurring of photography and painting echoes Stelarc’s blurring of the body as organism and art medium and he gives the artist a kind of film noir intensity. I like the dramatic vitality of Pople’s work and here he raises the question of the difference between man and performance and personae through the different panels. That the question is never resolved actually makes it more interesting than Stelarc’s work. Another case of a portraitist outdoing his subject is Nigel Milsom’s portrait of Adam Cullen. The full length work picks out a figure in tones of black and gives him hints of Picasso, German Expressionism and even a hint of mystery play. Milsom creates a theatrical image that might have come from the salon of an early Twentieth Century actor, it captures the idea of artist as celebrity and plays at a knowingly symbolic level. It’s much more interesting than Cullen’s own entry, a typically drippy cartoon.

There are some more bravura stylistic experiments here that appear to sneak in by way of apology from the judges. The high shine abstraction of 'I wake up with TODAY!' by Shane Bowden and Dean Reilly, looks calculated to shock, whilst it is striking, a massive mirror varnished black panel is broken by multi-coloured lines that hint at human chins. It's hard to say what, if anything, it's trying to do with the idea of the portrait, it isn't that daring just opaque and seems to be a triumph of style over subject. While that's confusing Marc De Jong's 'Janice Petersen' just looks confused. There's a convergence of ideas here that never quite works out, the paintings surface is either pointillist or pixellated, depending on your bent, makes one remember television when of an older, lower resolution, past. The subject, a newsreader at work, is painted as if the lights and cameras were between us and her. The painting has a hugely self conscious composition that's dominated by a big black clump of TV camera, one imagines that it is supposed to say something about being behind the scenes, or surface and reality. All of these odd alienating effects add up to far less than the sum of their parts.

There are sometimes small treasures to be found in these shows, tucked away in a corner one of these is Khue Nguyen's 'Unleashed'. So modest in size and palette this watercolour self-portrait undoes much of the clumsiness elsewhere. An obvious precursor is Arcimboldo whose puzzle portraits of men created from fruits, fish and flesh were commissioned for renaissance monarchs. Nguyen bleeds a symbolic octopus into his face, and almost camouflages himself. That puzzle set within a side-on portrait also reminds us of Titian's 'Allegory of Prudence' but here none of these references are highlighted or screamed. The overall of feel of the piece is that of a faded document, as though Nguyen were unearthing his own history and using the form of the portrait to understand who he is.

The fact of the Archibald being a portrait prize concerned with prominent Australians (as opposed to all those other Australians who commission painters to do portraits of them) is problematic where it ought to be enlightening. At present the galleries are filled with ‘ooh’s and ‘aaah’s as people recognise subjects and consider the veracity of the representation. Imagine though (and this would take imagination, first of all, amongst the judging panel) an annual review of the art of the portrait, of its conventions, discontents and possibilities. That would be worth queuing up for.