Justin O'Brien @ AGNSW

I've found the AGNSW's summer exhibition of the work of painter Justin O'Brien, subtitled 'the Sacred Music of Colour' curiously difficult to write about. It's a show I should love, a modern painter working with the iconography of the early (and pre) renaissance attempting to find relevance in traditional religious set-pieces and yet it there is something oddly unsatisfying . There is much to be charmed by in the beautifully hung upper rooms of the Sydney gallery but one is constantly struck by a contradiction between the restlessness of O'Brien's stylistic shifts and the stillness in the work itself.

The earlier work of O'Brien takes us through a search for a style, and whilst it's not entirely helpful (or terribly interesting) to take a trip through that restless search for a style it does show O'Brien looking for influences with painters who favoured extreme colour palates. Hence its of Cezanne and Matisse poke through even when the post-war dowdiness remains dominant. So it's not exactly surprising when you find a kind of Gaugin enthronement, It could be the garden of Eden or the Botanic Gardens 0f Sydney. Eve and the baptism are echoed in colour, but its Australian rather than genuinely tropical origins are betrayed by a predictably prudish fig leaf on the Polynesian Adam and Eden seems a very modest place.

Four portraits hung together are instructive, the subjects are treated so closely that it's a surprise to find they're not all self-portraits. These young men all have long stretched ovoid faces, wan and pale, chalky complexions and full lips they exude a certain sadness but little else, even as washes of wall swirl or scarlet clothes bleed into the frame. It's an odd effect characteristic of a visual tension in much of O'Brien's work between formal control and colourful abandon.

It's seen clearest in the fight between those fleshy mouths and the geometric planes of cheekbones, the stylisation (not unlike Modigliani) seems to suppress the individual force of faces and bodies. Colour, blocks and abstract swathes, seems more candid, but when in a portrait of one boy the split background suggests a split between purple storms and yellow lulls you are left with a disconnect between it and the serene face. I will generally run a mile to avoid an amateur psycho-biographical reading of painting but the tender restraint and studiously avoided carnality of some of these images made it no surprise to learn that they were painted by a young gay man in post Second World War century Australia.

It's not a boring exhibition by any means. Amongst the lushness are constant echoes, here we glimpse, Raphael's virgin, repeatedly Fra Angelico's blue and gold Enthronement, a kiss of judas every bit as strange as de Chirico but with the statuesque quaities of Mantegna or a Venus at here batch that might have been painted by Rousseau but with bodies of fleshy spheres and cylinders that are idealized exercises in solid geometry. The visual and iconographic restlessness of some of the work here also brings some sense to his settling on a few subjects (the dormition of the virgin, the miraculous draught of fishes amongst others) and a gently stylized almost Romanesque cubism (feel free to see it and describe it better, I see something of both). O'Brien values harmony, tonal and compositional, but he also represents moments of grace, acceptance and quiet dignity. Even in his Pieta, a tiny deflating Christ draped across a sculptural doe eyed virgin, the signs of his death a single faint stroke of the brush in a brown only a shade or two lighter than the skin, O'Brien finds peace in loss.

One thinks of modern artists appropriating the formal traits of the Renaissance and one expects a subversion or perhaps at least a constructive tension between that historically specific style and its codified subject matter. For instance Balthus frequently used Piero della Francesca as a model but released the dangerous heart of sex along with angelic longing. That doesn't happen with O'Brien in fact the opposite is true, the paintings seem to breath in and hold themselves tight in the hope of a graceful reception. It's almost the reverse of tension as compositions are politely balanced and colours are layered and complementary. O'Brien chose to paint things that sit on the cusp between medieval and renaissance style but doesn't even capture the tension between beauty and suffering, salvation and pain that we see in works by Giotto and Cimabue. O'Brien is clearly enchanted by the shapes and colours of this period but without the underlying tension between the human and the celestial that we feel in their original application these paintings seem little more than decorative.

And yet these works have a subtle and discreet power so it sin worth asking ourselves what else O'Brien might be trying to do. Many of O'Brien's images unfold as gentle sombre pageants, and soon you notice that typically most characters are there to bear witness rather than to act. That passiveness is further borne out by the smoothed line and imperceptible brush-strokes. Rather than bringing the expressionist whorl of modernism to an antique subject. These stretched figures can seem like bleached out El Grecos and perhaps that lack of mannerist drama is what makes them feel peculiar to a modern eye, especially when one considers the influence of El Greco on so many strains if modern painting.

In a show that shines with gold and lapis blue the most touching works are his subdued stations of the cross, pastel tissues of wash give life through restraint. There's a surreal minimal landscape, a washy polygonal delerium and a minimum of figures. The more restrained palette seems to release more gut spirit, a sadness and a clinging to life rather than a jolly gloss of pigment. The under drawings are penned in the firm sinuous lines of an engraver and their clarity also lends them a fragility . The Christ figure dominates, and although he's no less stylized than O'Brien's other figures he is far more physical thanks to the choice of pose, he falls and bends and each diversion from the perpendicular feels critical, a structure falling under stress. Viewed as a sequential series the work grows in power, it begins brighter then light fades from the polychrome of Pilate's condemnation to the bone bleached blue of the sepulchre. Hung in a U-shape in a gently lit room the sequence is gentle and meditative even as it is wracked with an inevitable path to the cross. It is a fine work in any context.

If you look beyond the subject matter and the blues and golds you get a sense that O'Brien painted light. Not the chiarascuro that needs shadow to bring it alive or the directional light as it flickers across impressionist water but the way that light bathes our overall perception. The chalkiness of the later still lives and the bone bleaching of some of the Greek landscape suggest less objects struck by light but the way it occupies the air. A Baptism on a Greek island might be set in a swimming hole, with its summery nostalgia for casual male nudity, but the gold above the pinky blue mesmerizes and you feel the warm soak of a summer day. This isn't the light of revelation or of the theatre, far from it as even in a scene of the taking of Christ in Gethsemane a lantern fails to emit rays, but rather a still radiance, an immersive substantial light.

Justin O'Brien was clearly an anachronism. It's less extraordinary that much of the very proper and restrained work here was made in the Twentieth Century that is was made in the 1960s, so much of it feels like it might have come form a more careful and polite period, one where individualism had not yet been fetishized. In fact such is the sense of quiet conformity that often Jesus's disciples look like a private school sports team on a day out. And perhaps that is the root of O'Brien's creative tension, that between conformity and individuality. Clearly anyone who decides to paint his own obsessive hommage to early-rennaissance frescoes at the end of the 1950s isn't a conformist. I'm willing to accept that there is something deep in O'Brien's work and that is veiled in a visual embrace of the gentle and the contemplative in the face of culture romanticizing shrill expressions of individualism. The sense of grace, of a surrender to ones fate, might not be terribly fashionable but that makes it no less vauable.

On The Path To Abstraction @ AGNSW

Currently 'creativity' is a word rarely uttered in art word circles. The importance of the concept, the contradiction and the hones paradox is king, clothed or not, and the idea of an individual impulse to seek form and shape for an interior impulse is smiled at as being hopelessly romantic. In that post-modern art school context one might shy away from a portmanteau show about the phenomenon of abstraction, expecting it to be full of dogma and theory. Happily that's not the case. 'Paths To Abstraction' at Sydney's AGNSW feels a little like exhibition as lecture, but that shouldn't sound like faint praise. Throughout the rooms there hangs such an intricate gossamer web of influence and impulse that rather than an harangue this lecture feels like the best sort, a gentle and persuasive nudge toward connection and insight.

A modest selection of Whistler begins the show. Straightaway it's an interesting hang (curatorially that is, the staging is pretty modest given the sensory possibilities and later a single red room feels like it's been left over from something else) the two Whistler pieces show his astonishing dive into a musical palette of smudged impressions. 'Nocturne: Black and Gold' from 1875 is striking for its gentle introspective depiction of an explosive shower of fireworks and for the way that a black wash, the fingerprints of vertical drips and a sneeze of gold can capture something so perfectly. The smear of a Victorian night gives away little but captures all. The paint is less redolent of smoke and meteorological effects than it is the blur between perception and memory. Like so much in this exhibition a small canvass feels like the epicenter of something seismic. That's reinforced when he's hung next to impersonators, one of whom appears to be a young Picasso.

What strikes one as impressive throughout is not so much the paths taken as the impulses that have driven artists toward the abstract. The number of groups and movements represented through Impressioninsts, Fauvists, Constructivists, Cubists, Expressionists, Nabis and Futurists begin to demonstrate that abstraction is less a formal style than a communicative necessity. It's certainly possible to see tracks that link artists and images, intentional or not Cezanne to Analytical Cubism looks the groove of a well trodden short cut, but these aren't as interesting as seeing (or sometimes just feeling) the shared impulse between visually dissimilar works. The breadth of colour and shape and construction serve a question to the modernist notion of abstraction as being a purely painterly approach that separated paint from subject or object. Braque's analysis of shape is a response to an accelerating and mechanizing world just as the Futurists try to mould a new kind of speed and change in pigment. Again and again artists appear to be wrestling at the edge of their practice, forcing something more onto the canvass than they've seen before. It's like watching the transition between thought and expression again and again, each time with fewer boundaries.

The sheer eroticism of so much of the work here shouldn't be understated. Before the Ab-Ex model of artist as priapic savant had been established the sheer lubricity of form and colour that writhes from these pictures can only have been shocking. As figurative subjects begin to melt then artists are left with form, shape and materials, the physicality of a lot of the paintings is sensuous and sexy but the visual interplay, the rhymes and responses takes you to the most intimate relationships. Where sex is most literally apparent, the nudes of Bonnard and Delaunay, they take on a delirious character. It's almost as though El Greco's holy spirit has become the vibration filled air of desire (Maurice Denis' more devout Calvary might remind us of that master of Spain too). There are three versions of Robert Delaunay's 'Nude Woman Reading' and as the voyeuristic scene becomes less representative, the connections looser, the shapes more fetishized and symbolic of a thigh or a buttock it becomes more lubricous and affecting. The book and table retain their physical image and the woman fades, making Delaunay's subject nothing less than sex itself.

This is the great discovery of abstraction. That one can capture essence. Matisse's 'Nude in the Woods' is both essential and conceptual. You're immediately struck by the pinks and just enough hint of a posture to make the title redundant. The fuschia seems to expand and populate the painting, echoed by lilac blocks of sky. Pink is the brilliant tonal analog of flesh, the image is overtaken by it fleshiness, its nudeness, just as dropping a nude into a landscape possesses the rest of the image. Matisse goes further, the nude itself is not the pinkest area of the picture, it's the scratchiest lumpiest. Even as he pushed himself into the abstract Matisse uses colour to show something perfectly flawed and human. It's a small painting but it contains so much it's dizzying.

One of the brilliant and refreshing elements here is the equal weight given to lithographs. woodcuts and other print-making techniques. The relatively easy dissemination of editioned works on paper is another thread that winds around and across this path to abstraction. So too does the demand of media where limitations of means inspire the most direct and economical expression. Kandinsky's 'Blue Rider' might be as influential as any work here, and it shares a lineage with Gaugin's tribal woodcuts and Munch's interior projections. The woodcut might have been as important in the spread of a more abstract essentialist art as the printing press had been the ideas and techniques of linear perspective in that earlier seismic shift. Some of the works on paper are sublimely beautiful and they highlight masters of different media, like Gaugin and especially Bonnard. It's good not to see them relegated to the margins.

The show is not perfect, the final room entitled 'the limits of abstraction' feels like a stumble on the path. It is neither a resolution or the posing of a question to take out into the world. And, to be honest, Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel has probably spun round enough shows about enough things for it not to shed much light on where this particular path leads to. The best themed shows reveal something about ourselves far more than they shine a light on particular artists. As an exercise in topography 'Paths to Abstraction' is interesting, however as a demonstration of the human mind and its desperate and essential need to communicate the unspeakable and ineffable it throws up echoes, shadows and harmonies that will stay with viewers every time they encounter the boring formalist and theoretical explanations for the modern and conceptual. That ability to make us look at fare more recent work differently an better makes this show a success.

On Printmaking in the age of Romanticism @ AGNSW

There's a blue and pumping vein of individualism that has run through the artistic movements that have left their mark most clearly on our culture. The Renaissance presented the objective truth of the individual at the centre of art it gave bodies the dignity of singularity. Abstract Expressionists claimed the ultimate ascendancy of the individual's interior world and painted its mucky birthing into the external. Romanticism bloomed with the celebration of subjectivity, our selves governed the world as we experienced it and its meaning comes from how we see it. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales's exhibition 'Printmaking in the Age of Romanticism' we see how a subjective view of the world, where the land and the elements become expressions of our inner selves, was also an attempt to make sense of life in an uncertain world.

At either end of this of the lush red walled space created for the exhibition is a reminder that romanticism had some of itsroots deep and dark in the revival of the gothic. In the first room William Blake wrenches the tombs of Westminster Abbey that he saw as a boy into sinuous life, whilst Fuseli lifts the curtain on a dark pre-Freudian life of English literature. At the end sits the Charles Meryon's 'Vampire' and the Paris Morgue. This look over the shoulder back to the awesome certainties of a medieval world came at a time of massive social and economic change, as the industrial revolution rolled out of the heart of England. Romanticism sat across a period where radical politics confronted economic upheaval. Subsequently it is far more complex than it is often presented. The gothic strain is less a nostalgia and more a search for precedent and universal values to apply to the present in the past. The nature worship and sublimity of landscape is an external echo of the power of humanity and imagination

Nature looms large (and there is always an awful lot of looming in Turner) and another key theme here is the romantic longing for the pastoral. William Blake uses Virgil's pastoral's as jumping off points for a series of minute stylized wood engravings that present a very English paradise. Edward Calvert's series of tiny jewel like images hark back to a mythical England, a pre-lapsarian innocence. 'The Chamber Idyll' is sgriking in its modesty and guileless eroticism. Framed by beams that almost provide a proscenium there is a tremendous sense of voyeurism as we see a woman undress for her lover, around are symbols of passion and fecundity. This small exquisitely engraved piece is worth the visit alone.

The work of William Blake is always at least fascinating. His line filled figures are like El Greco's, pure spirit captured in flesh whilst, even if his personal symbology is opaque to viewers today, its drama is undeniable. The selections hear from 'The Book of Job' represent him perfectly, bordered with text, some biblical, some his own composition they show an absolutely vital spiritual ques, a negotiation between the Old Testament and a personal visionary mythology. Job's story is of faith and patience in the face of Satan, this is a strong point of identification for Blake and the personal gives these enormous power. What is most striking here is Blake's technique, eschewing stippling or shading he works in pure line and this gives a dynamism that almost makes the paper twist and clench.

There is evidence of both the literary and the fantastic throughout the exhibition. These prints are often narrative, taking their subjects from the Pantheon of English literature Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. These often feel like the most dated and least compelling work (although we ought to remember that their narrative function means that success or otherwise can be achieved through different criteria than those we apply today). Fuseli's grotesqueries look like English literature's greatest hits. In rendering Shakespeare and Milton so vividly he renders it literal, and as a result it looks one dimensional, there are also oddly jarring moments, like the hilariously English looking Miranda in his Tempest picture His paintings, with their smokey blackness hide, and subsequently provoke, more. The Miltonian work of John Martin is similarly dramatic whilst being oddly unmoving. His hell looks like one designed by Albert Speer (and his Babylon cold be a collaboration between DW Griffith and Saddam Hussein) and the sheer blackness of the work shows us why we think of dark as inky. The problem with the deployment of typically romantic technique in these literal contexts is the loss of the power of suggestion, subsequently Fuseli and Martin feel like curiosities.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the show is the presentation of Turner's prints in their different states, in particular 'Dartmouth Cove' this is less of technical interest but a powerful example of the romantic ethic. The twin states of Turner's pastoral landscapes, in particular are an illustration of both technique and meaning. In the earlier etching his lines are crisp and descriptive, in the second state he applies a layer of darkness, that comes over like the dark forebodings of a coastal storm. It is more than meteorological, the darkness takes is a layer of meaning, the picnickers are threatened, Turner feels and sees turmoil. This is how landscape becomes personal and symbolic.

Print is a comparatively egalitarian art form, these images here could be disseminated widely and would have an enormous impact on visual culture. It is important to remember that so many of the artists of the period were politically committed and active and often the romantic themes of the historic and the pastoral were intrinsically linked to calls for natural justice to be restored or declarations of the dignity of working people. This political expression is most clearly visible in the endlessly inventive satires of Honoré Daumier. In the lithograph 'Bring Down The Curtain this Farce is Over' a Comédie Francaise clown is about to put and end to a parliamentary sitting. It's worth remembering when contemporary artists talk about transgression that in Paris in 1834 sedition was life-threatening and this period was bookended by two revolutions.

The exhibition is composed of French and English artists, which form the gallery's holdings this is a shame that the scope could not have been expanded with loans, the contrast between this present and German artists would have been interesting. Of course the one of the greatest artists of the period also was the supreme printmaker and it would have been a coup to bring in Goya's tortured, wry and pessimistic Spanish Romanticism into the mix. However there is extraordinary work here and it allows us to see how a movement developed in response to a changing world and used the resources of history and nature to try to assert man's place, it's a good story.

On Dali @ NGV

Everyone knows something about Dali, melting watches, curly moustaches, pouting lipglossed sofas, if you're a discerning art lover .  The problem with Dali is that the critical backlash where he is portrayed as kitschy quasi-fascist self-publicist is every bit as simple minded and reductive as his own eccentric artistic genius schtick.  To simply come to Dali from either position leaves us at an impasse. 

In 'Salvador Dali:  Liquid Desire' the NGV has put on an amazing show.  This is the official version of Dali, the lenders are the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali,the private foundation set up to promote and defend Dali's art and stature and the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, a museum built on the private collection of the Morse family.  That means you have a set of works with encyclopedic depth and breadth but none of the iconic works such as 'The Great Masturbator',  'The Persistence of Memory' or 'Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)' in Madrid, New York and Philadelphia respectively.  The show is quite brilliantly staged, from its neon signatures to black and red velvet rooms and a continuing ant and rhino motif (go and see, it's so much better than it can ever sound) and the curators should be applauded and awarded.

'Soft Self Portrait with Grilled Bacon' might limply straddle the two conventional views of Dali.  Here he is deflated, hollowed out, an artist held up by nothing but the crutches of his artifice.  Dali as his own subject and object.  At the same time he's the realist surrealist, the creator of images that burn into the brain and make the skin crawl, the artist of universal neuroses.  It is interesting to think that Dali is so derided for a his self-obsession, a trait that found him a perfect marriage partner not in Gala but in Freud, in a society as enamoured of its own image as ours.  This exhibition does pose questions about Dali's value to the past and present of art, it offers an opportunity to move away from the knee jerk reactions that began when his raised eyebrow so enraged the very serious abstract expressionists.  Dali's crimes against an art establishment so excited by its splashes of rebellious abstraction were manifold.  He had a sense of humour and he believed in figuration and classical technique.

As a student of art, who genuinely loved his many sources, Dali is much more than a pasticheur.  On arrival of America he attempts, through an exhibition to ignite a passion for the renaissance in his new American audience with riffs on Durer and Raphael, in a quest that might be on a little less fantastic than that of another of his subjects, Don Quixote.  His series of illustration to 'The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini' are appropriate, an artistic genius but a renaissance bastard Cellini's autobiography is ocassionally a work of ego-serving lies and exaggeration.  Dali's illustrations are both fantastical and sordid, the grip of his art sometimes loosening on the appeal of fantasy.  

Nothing here is a better example of how Dali understood the power art than 'Archaeological Reminiscence's of Millet's Angelus', one of a series of works where Dali explored one of the nineteenth century's most reproduced paintings.  Here the figure of the man and woman looking at their poor harvest and praying for better has been transformed into a pair of ruined steeples on a desert plain.  The melancholy sky and shadowed earth set the mood as a father and his son, tiny in the foreground, look on.  In Dali's universe the scene is turned into one of predatory sexuality, elsewhere the woman in a locust, here as culture crumbles it still leaves a long shadow.  You do not have to subscribe to Dali's personal mythology of sexual predation and initiation to feel certain resonances.

'The First Days of Spring' is there at the beginning of what we would recognise as archetypal Dali, a vast horizon lays out before us meeting a sapphire sky.  The landscape is a set of enormous steps that might be the base of some totalitarian edifice, a slash of classical linear perspective through the middle of the canvass.  Dali is dipping into his Freudian bag of symbols, in a combinaton of collage (photographs painted into the surface of the picture).  Father figures, men who might be fighting or fucking, fish and genitals are all part of this dreamscape and it feels much more like a psychoanalytic journal, than a work capable of communicating universal neuroses.  Dali's signature style, the vast fleshy forms, twisting, limp, deflated are what we know him best for.  There is a reason these are so powerful, like the works of the early expressionists they show a physical world transformed by inner trauma, but here the feeling of flesh and nerve endings is so palpable they are far more effective.

To look at Dali's career longitidunally you see an artist searching for a style, who finds a voice somewhere between Freudian symbology and soft figurative cubism.  As this voice becomes a patented style he continues searching for visual analogues for science and spiritualism, but never manages to find that visual bridge between the deeply personal and the universal again.  His art does touch on universality, his themes reach beyond personal neuroses when he finds archetypes for disgust, regret, absence and lust.  In one sense they are lessened when each image is so closely cross-referenced with Dali's biography, surrealism ought to be best understood at a sub-rational level, our eyes and gut are probably the best judge.

The NGV show puts Dali in his place, both historically and geographically, it is not irrelevant. The two influences that come out most clearly here are Giorgio de Chirico and El Greco.  De Chirico's classicism and architectural enigmas, are a clear visual precursor.  These imagined landscapes might be successor's to the 'memory palaces' created by renaissance humanists, mysteries and treasures lie hide within.  

The Spanish landscape of 'Cadaques From Creus Tower' might be a view of El Greco's Toledo.  More strikingly if we think of the way that El Greco took a leap out from Mannerism into a world of writhing, spectral spiritual energy rendered in colours we see something of a very Spanish Dali.  No less Spanish are the repetition of food, blood and shit, these are typically Catalan obsessions. it's when you force yourself to realise that Dali is a very Spanish painter that his work starts to make sense again and take shape beneath the blur of hype.

Later Dali does lose its way, there is no denying that.  His experimentation seems restless and gratuitous, his atomic period might be an isotope of analytical cubsim but there are still lines of continuity.  His masterful draughtsmanship and facility for realism are still important.  But at some point he starts to explore his own image rather than his own psyche, and this is where powerful slides into interesting which finally deflates into kitsch.  Celebrity navel gazing can never be as compelling as his relentless exploration the anxieties of our bodies and of occupying our own skin (which is what so many of his successors have failed equally to remember).  This is essentially why at least a significant amount of his work has proven to be so powerful and so many people while so much of surrealism, as an abstracted writerly movement, withered on the vine.

Dali's late re-embrace of Catholicism is the final straw for many of his critics.  He would never have been a saint in their eyes anyway.  Put together with the sympathy for Franco and we have an ideological bogeyman for latter day critics.  But the weird moral universe of the art world is illustrated by the avant garde saint André Breton's expulsion of Dali from the surrealist group.  Of course Dali's real sin was public ambition and cupidity, obscene wealth in artists ought to come in a hair shirt (if you're Picasso) or an ironic theoretical justification (if you're a Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons).  Creative rebellion tends to like conformity much more than it ever dares to admit.

Dali attempted to paint a new mythology for the century of the Self, he tried to capture the rift between a man's psyche and his physical environment and for a period that many artist's would kill for he succeeded brilliantly.  Art can never exculpate its creators of their crimes, but if we insist on the ethical and ideological purity of our artists we will find lots of empty picture hooks on museum walls.  This show might not make you love Dali the man but it ought to make you think again about Dali the painter.