Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne
Visual Arts Ashley Crawford
Craig Easton: Loose
Abstraction in the Antipodes has a strange history. As both an idea and a method it was an import from the United States and Europe where the notion of the abstract had taken on the patina of either high fashion or an expression of deep spirituality. It gained dramatic visibility in Australia when the National Gallery of Victoria first opened its doors on St Kilda Road in 1968 with the exhibition The Field. Artists such as Peter Booth, Robert Hunter, Robert Rooney, Dale Hickey and Robert Jacks were displayed with minimalist canvases _ and a new movement was both hailed and derided. As a “movement”, however, it was short lived. Booth and Rooney moved rapidly into more figurative realms. And while Hunter’s work continued to be described as minimalist abstraction, his complex, geometric grid paintings developed a language far removed from American predecessors. But abstraction has never gone away, as can be seen in the current Store 5 Is exhibition at the Anna Schwartz Gallery. An entirely new generation in the late ‘80s – that included artists Stephen Bram, Melinda Harper and Kerrie Poliness – began exploring the realm. Craig Easton would not look out of place in the Store 5 Is show. Like Bram’s work there is more than the hint of the architectural here, of physical presence gone awry. But the unnerving thing about Easton’s canvases is that they suggest a narrative, figurative element – one just out of grasp. While the results may be cool, with smoothly textured surfaces of matt and gloss paint, there are hints of apocalyptic narratives running throughout, suggestions of alien presence and emerging tendrils. Underlying these elegant structures could be the shifting realities of novelist William S. Burroughs or the twisted organic blasphemies in the films of David Cronenberg. But Easton is too subtle to pin down. In one of the most powerful works, architect (2004), a black cube sits in the centre of the canvas, built up in high gloss enamel against a matt surface. It is immediately an alien fortress or a military black box, its perfect stygian surfaces crackling with internal energy and seeping to the canvas’s edge. The title inevitably conjures thoughts of of conscious design: habitat or military outpost. But the residents of this otherworldly structure, while organic, are far from human. In a wonderful trick of optical illusion, the high gloss of Easton’s surfaces creates a reflection of the viewer, inserting the audience as a participant in his abstraction, a kind of faux figuration. When formal abstraction moves into the realms of the organic or the architectural, it is inevitable that the human eye will recognise what it wishes: a human torso, a head, a plane fin, or perhaps a video monitor. But to place such fanciful impositions on Easton’s paintings is essentially misleading. Easton has taken the histories of formalism and pop, pure abstraction and abstract figuration and thrown them into a blender of his
own design. While not always successful (the show could have been slightly culled), Easton has come up with a powerful hybrid language that seems, despite its historical reference points, totally contemporary.
