GREG CREEK - 'Paintings'
Sarah Scout Presents – 7th June – 14th July 2024
Six large canvases show the gallery’s new Collingwood premises to advantage and confirm the artist’s direction to a more diffuse and fragmented structure, to melancholic themes.
Installation view
The centrepiece is the imposing triptych ‘Ha-Ha-Theatre Painting’ (2023) 198.5 X 600 cm with its sombre, desaturated palette, a foreground of gnarled and tangled branches and a background of ghostly white buildings, a photo silkscreen of the nineteenth century Yarra Bend Asylum, a mental asylum, situated on the banks of The Yarra River at Alphington at what would have been the outskirts of Melbourne and near the artist’s present home. The overall impression is unmistakeably elegiac, wistful, gloomy.
‘Ha-Ha-Theatre Painting’ (2023) 198.5 X 600 cm acrylic and oil on canvas
[Click on image for enlargement]
‘Ha-Ha-Theatre’ actually refers to the enclosing wall ditch to the long gone institution, along which a number of bodies (presumably of inmates) were buried. The work is notable for the absence of figures to the foreground, the artist’s reputation being for a painter of the figure, yet in the central panel, something like a prone figure, in serendipitous blobs and stains emerges at the foot of the scrub, confirming the melancholic mood and suggesting an intriguing retreat of sorts for the artist.
Central panel to ‘Ha-Ha-Theatre Painting’ with reclining figure at base.
Incidentally, the tangle of branches throughout echo recent work by Melbourne artists Kim Westcott and Andrew Browne. We have possibly a local trope...
The show is titled simply ‘Paintings’ as was his previous show, at the gallery’s Collins Street premises in 2020, and the focus upon the medium is again an emphasis upon the variety or disparity of techniques at the artist’s disposal. The wealth of options signals something not just about the artist’s technical repertoire but importantly about subjects or themes.
A peculiar feature of these options is the insertion of additional panels of canvas, not merely glued on top of the existing surface but actually inserted and replacing the underlying area. This substitution is secured on the back of the canvas with an additional matching piece of canvas glued into position. The unstretched canvas is then re-stretched by specialists.
The reverse side of a ‘Painting’ canvas, showing the patching that secures an inserted section.
Many artists obviously add or ‘collage’ elements onto their work, may not hold any special preference for paint as a medium, and instead flag a process of cancellations, errors and revisions, maintaining this as crucial record to the expressive meaning of the work, as their signature.
Nothing like this arises in Creek’s recent work. It all happens on the back of the work, out of sight. The artist’s desire is to maintain a unified surface to the painting, to ensure an all but immaculate integration with the work’s many techniques. And this in itself tells us something about the artist’s temperament and approach. It remains a bank of carefully curated options within which subjects correspondingly disperse, are in their own way desaturated, detached and distanced.
‘Black-Egg Painting’ (2024) 198.5 X 198.5 cm acrylic and oil on canvas
A work such as ‘Black-Egg Painting’ (2024) highlights several aspects of this approach. The inserted areas of stained canvas, elsewhere photo silkscreens, are able to turn abstract or symbolic, document the literal or concrete, literally on a scalpel blade, without missing a beat, maintaining perfect pitch to colour and tone, even as pitch is re-layed mid-game. Stained canvas here is carefully marshalled for some more arch shape, perhaps part wing. But acrylic stains on raw canvas usually register as an initial loose gesture, an appeal to chance. Imported in measured portions the effect is anything but free or fresh, rather abstraction is glossed as something like obscure compilation.
In reproduction, the motor scooter, tram and distant manor may not seem strictly photographic elements, but up close they display the broad tone screen dots reserved for cheap hardcopy, hardly in use in his age of inkjet printing to various surfaces. Here they add to the dated, nostalgic air, the darkened sky adding to the gloom.
Detail of photo silkscreen of tram and motor scooter
Here too, figures are more prominent but are confined to all but transparent silhouettes, seemingly inspecting the cupped recesses to an empty forecourt, one with an infant.
Detail of photo silkscreen for cupped recesses
The project would routinely be identified as Post Modern or Contemporary history painting, perhaps a little late to the cause, but pacing developments overseas in the work of Neo Rauch, Marius Bercea, Guillaume Bresson, at one point, Nigel Cooke and Adrian Ghenie, closer to home in the work of Stephen Bush. This review finds Creek's placement somewhat to one side of this and that his interests actually align with quite a different strand to contemporary painting.
Before pursuing this however, account should be taken of Creek’s current approach to the figure. On his website he groups many of the works in the show under the rubric of ‘Homunculus Paintings’ – this no more than a working tag and understood as a concept of a smaller, inner person, a self-concept perhaps. For Creek this mini-me directs his efforts to give his painting an authentic or personal engagement, to place himself within the work somehow.
This quest is understandably drawn to figures, and figures grow more elusive – and allusive – as a consequence. The trouble is that this kind of attachment has been effectively concealed. The artist wants an authenticity from something that is already deeply micro-managed. One cannot scrupulously edit oneself and still expect authenticity. There is no way to actually place the personal or person in this arrangement without the figure becoming more general, more abstract or dispersed.
‘Fraud-Garden Painting' (2024) 198.5 X 198.5 cm acrylic and oil on canvas
In ‘Fraud-Garden Painting’ (2024) the female on the left is rendered wraith-like; a victim of fashion or spirit; perhaps emerging as a genie summoned by the conductor on the right. The choice of a conductor as a contrasting character is surely no coincidence (and surely a portrait of Mark Zuckerberg). All rests on an orchestration of techniques.
‘Labour-Outbreak Painting’ (2022) 198.5 X 198.5 cm acrylic and oil on canvas
Similarly, the figures to ‘Labour-Outbreak Painting’ (2022) are never quite positioned, spontaneous or secure. The possible double entendre to ‘Labour’ only underlines a homunculus in transit. In works as large as these, reproductions struggle with much detail, are of limited use in commentary.
The approach arises from the artist’s singular development throughout the 00s where he exchanges a reputation for local and satirical allegories for series of small linked sketches exhibited as ‘desktop’ sequences or in display cases. There the artist is free to explore all manner of techniques and materials at the expense of a more pointed or direct subject. The move was possibly prompted by accusations of mere illustration to preceding allegories. At any rate the shift dramatically broadens his expressive vocabulary. In doing so the artist took a more discursive approach to theme while demonstrating a formidable versatility – indeed virtuosity – of technique. A recent compilation for example is simply titled ‘One Hundred Drawings of Love, Death and Politics’ although links from many sketches share at most a tenuous link to the theme.
Sheet from ‘Paris Desktop’ (2000) 53.3 x 115.5cm mixed media on paper [NOT IN SHOW]
[Click on image for enlargement]
Around 2019 the artist began to apply this repertoire to large canvases. Amongst the first was ‘Refuge-Guernsey Painting’ (2019) a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial prize in Bendigo Art Gallery in 2019.
‘Refuge-Guernsey Painting’ (2019) 198.5 X 198.5 cm acrylic and oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
Here various gestural techniques abstract the foreground figures, these crucially augmented by the artist’s handprints. The appeal is to the artist’s touch at its most immediate, yet its position is scarcely any more integral or illuminating. We get that the artist identifies with the leaping figure, but this only begs more substance from the figure and that in turn would not leave enough room for the personal touch. Creek chooses poetry over realism. Tellingly, the background uses a photo silkscreen (1929 Shepparton) to point to the contrast between factual setting and expressive but elusive figures.
The work derives from the vast series of sketches titled ‘One Hundred Drawings of Love, Death and Politics’ but the subject is rendered opaque here through latitude granted mini-me. This steady retreat from an obvious subject or theme is what subtly sets Creek apart from Contemporary history painting. Where his work finds as much, if not more affinity is with the trend that derives from Peter Doig’s paintings of holiday resorts and drifts into more escapist myths, amounting to a kind of recreational sublime. Doig is notable also for his use of large, random stains and spatters. Later Australian exponents such as Adam Lee, Stephen Pleban, Tim McMonagle, even Seth Birchall or Richard Lewer, all embrace the temporary wilderness of the getaway landscape that is quietly ineffable but fun.
Creek carries a special brooding reserve here, but as landscape takes on greater prominence in his work, and architecture serves only to direct vanishing points there, something of a shared solitude is foregrounded. Elsewhere mythic and magical figures also echo with a more distant realm.
‘Lubeck-Red Shift Painting’ (2024) 198.5 X 198.5 cm acrylic and oil on canvas
Contemporary history painting is noted for its fragmentation, disjuncture and incompleteness, signalling a lack of coherence to style or subject and Creek’s work certainly shares these gaps. Interestingly, recent work by Stephen Bush also converges upon these gaps.
A standard reading concludes that history or myth can never be the whole story; that culture is in a state of flux. An alternative reading might be that such painting now confronts a disturbing internal rupture, that a common cultural fabric is no longer possible.
This is a must-see show that rewards close and sustained inspection.
