Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane
©Mark Pennings, Finish- review, Eyeline 65, p.59, February 2008
Craig Easton at Ryan Renshaw Gallery 10-30 August, 2007
Craig Easton made his Brisbane debut at Ryan Renshaw Gallery and confirmed his reputation as one of Melbourne’s better abstract painters. He presented refined, meticulous and highly aesthetic elaborations of the genre in a mix of large-scale abstract paintings, smaller shelf pieces, and wooden containers. Sometimes Easton exists in a kind of twilight zone for he is a traditionalist who remains open to recent developments. His commitment to technical expertise and his exploration of abstraction’s formal dimensions is somewhat out of kilter with some of today’s painters who are post-production conceptualists. The latter tend to treat painting styles as freewheeling options that are adapted and combined to produce works that don’t have a consistent look, style, material, subject, or theme. Yet, Easton shares the new generations’ desire to exploit the worlds of decoration, sculpture and architecture to expand painting’s range of operations. Like Abbts, Kilimnik and others, he focuses on ‘how’ to make do with painting’s legacy rather than getting hung up on pondering the ontology of the medium. Easton is methodical and fastidious painter and explores new territory in the same assiduous manner as he approaches everything else. Cases in point were the large-scale works “Finish” (2007) and “Suddenly” (2007). “Finish” contained a white field and upper portion of black rectangles from which dripped lines of paint. The drip is readily associated with the artist’s unique brush mark and has expressionistic connotations, but this untidiness is anathema to Easton’s scruples. Accordingly, he depicted them in a highly stylised manner and
turned them into motifs that could be readily incorporated into his tasteful decorative ensembles. He is more adventurous in “After” (2007) where he sets up a beguiling interface between gloss/matt, recession/projection, and interior/exterior. His abstract schema consisted of three black fields (gloss and matt) and a white stripe along the left hand side. This arrangement elicited a lively play of internal formal
relationships, but Easton also left the work open to exterior interventions, for the glossy field reflected the viewer looking into the painting. This had the effect of making abstractions’ aspirations to transcendence prey to the figurative and the ephemeral (represented by the changing line of spectators who view the work and see themselves in it). This was an important manoeuvre for it demonstrated that Easton acknowledges the limits of
abstraction, especially in regards to its supposed autonomy. “Airlock” (2006) applies the same lessons except in focuses more on drawing attention to painting’s place in social reality. A matt black field housed receding planes that acted as interior frames. By graduating the shading in these planes Easton presented us with a clever exercise in illusions of perspectival space and optical effects. However, these were supplemented by allusions to an entryway into a gallery space, which drew the spectator away from aesthetic self-absorption
and made them aware of art as a social phenomenon. Easton’s ‘shelf’ paintings were impressive attempts to extend the reach of abstract painting. These were small works on aluminium panels that were slotted into aluminium supports. The works presented an orange, green,
black and white modular assemblage populated by a lexicon of symbols and icons. These hybrid ‘test-sites’ included orange bars that enveloped bare aluminium grounds, drain pipe patterns that formed stark contrasts,
and barcode references that divided up pictorial space. One delightful piece had two panels placed together like a jigsaw. They contained a black square and orange polyhedron. The orange form overlapped the black shape and generated a stylised fracture that danced between rupture and reformulation. In the shelf series, Easton used the gambit of design to disrupt painting’s conventional terms of reference, but he also plays a double game. On one level, the works could be interpreted as a resuscitation of De Stijl’s neo-plastic universal design scheme, but could just as easily represent painting’s transition into shelf-like ornamentation. This meant that ‘pure’ painting became more generic objet d’art than fine art extrapolation. In this instance, Easton responds to the contemporary moment in painting and its promiscuous correspondence
with cultural areas like design and architecture. Easton only pushes the boundaries so far but he is willing to relinquish claims to painting’s formalist ‘authority’, despite the fact that he values control, precision, and finely
wrought aesthetic effects. Perhaps Easton’s greatest strength is also a weakness. His commitment to technical proficiency, integrity and ‘finish’ is a bit of an anachronism in today’s culture, but he is far from a painter defeated by the tide of history.
He is bright enough to recognise the dilemmas facing a painter of his ilk and works hard to make the most of the marriage between his refined sense of aesthetic quality, and the urge for innovation and conceptual
relevance. At the moment it seems that Easton has released the bats, but still wants to be able to tag them all and follow their progress. Maybe he should just let them lead a life of their own for a while and see what they turn up.
Mark Pennings
