JAN NELSON - 'Black River Running #16'
Anna Schwartz Gallery - 14th September – 26th October 2024
Installation view
The show comprises ten works, ranging from modest, (41 X 41 cm) to outsize (270 X 207 cm) these divided between mixed media and oil on canvas. The most striking feature is the seeming counterpoint between a wall of mostly large, black abstract works in vigorous, deep relief and on the facing wall, an array of works in silver paint using imagery derived from mass media of refugee boats and activist conflict, the deliberate contrast giving the show a sense of an ensemble or installation.
The artist is a distinguished figure on the Melbourne art scene, with a long career (b. 1955) and last showed at Anna Schwarz six years ago. Her methods are particularly slow, meticulous and painstaking. She was however included in the vast survey ‘Melbourne Now’ at the Ian Potter Museum last year, with an installation featuring hand-made wind-chimes and an enormous crocheted circular throw rug. That was a more forthright installation, a mode familiar to her work. The new show and works again use the title ‘Black River Running’ – a title of the artist’s devising - used since 2017 for her more familiar hyper-realistic paintings of young girls in vivid costume and accessories. But the current show strikes out in bold and unexpected directions, under the aegis of Black River Running, and over earlier series.
What is surprising is not only that subject matter now includes large groups of figures and integral settings but that these prompt reading as a literal or actual situation rather than a symbolic or metaphorical one, more customary in her work. Works address the present and past world far more directly than in previous work, while at the same time couch content in distinctly distanced or detached terms, firstly in the use of highly reflective silver paint, secondly in a broader tracing of photographic projection.
‘Black River Running #25’ (2024) 41 X 41 cm oil on canvas
The use of silver paint presents special difficulties in photographic documentation, since its high reflectance under a standard aperture setting for camera, tends to present as simply a high key grisaille. Visitors to the gallery website may be misled to the complexity and optical challenge until actually witnessing the works, as was this reviewer. This is particularly true of the larger works and makes commentary on details particularly difficult.
It is, above all, an earnest recommendation to visit the show.
‘Black River Running #17’ (2023-24) 200 X 254 cm oil on canvas ‘Black River Running #17’, the largest of the silver paintings, actually uses a variety of silver pigments, from commercial versions to paste and artist’s oil paint, in a variety of applications to create a range of reflectances to the surface, in places this gives the work a broad gestural sweep, in others, an intricate stippling.
Detail centre left of ‘Black River Running’ #17
The image is actually of a small boat packed with refugees, this, much more clearly visible upon actual viewing and while the image and its outlines plainly announce a photographic source in tonal cues, the enclosed shapes are painstakingly
built up, with a thickened or paste of silver pigment, creating a distinct
raised level to the surface, giving shapes something of an embossed quality,
outlines registering thus as a kind of rigid template.
The technique preserves outlines to the photographic source, preserves a unified colour or tone to the whole, yet finds a way to literally take its shapes to another, albeit modest level. In this, the work acquires a special expressive value for the artist, a demonstration of intense self-discipline, patient ingenuity and technical virtuosity. She stakes a place within depiction. These qualities were previously available in hyper-realist works, both in painting and sculpture under different terms, but are here granted new latitude to imagery and technique.
Detail of ‘Black River Running’ #19 (2024) 168 X 198 cm oil on canvas
Silver thus allows the content an added ambiguity, a ‘quicksilver’ grasp of the picture that enhances the artist’s attitude toward source image while providing special challenges to her means of rendering.
‘Black River Running'’ #22 (2023) 50 X 50 cm oil on canvas
Smaller works take a more simplified approach, with backgrounds still rendered for optimum reflectance, but source imagery merely modified by darker pigment. This is closer to a traditional grisaille, offers less conspicuous ingenuity, but a more relaxed, summary treatment of photographic source.
‘Black River Running’ #24 (2024) 41 X 50 cm oil on canvas
The images, while ostensibly topical, also hold private associations for Nelson, so that treatment reflects something deeper than just politics, where reflectance is perhaps as much a matter of contemplation as surface sheen and implies not just a detachment from current affairs but a more thoroughgoing restraint.
Installation view
Against the artist’s lighter side, works ‘Black River Running #16’, ‘Black River Running #18’, ‘Black River Running #20’ and ‘Black River Running #21’ for the most part plunge into black abstraction, to register as a symbol of perhaps disgust or revulsion in parallel to the silver works’ cautious view on the world. Yet the contrast need not be merely matching hyperbole – one resting in grey areas the other in blackest overload. The dark wall also declares an expressive value to materials independent of depiction and to something subtler and curiously organic.
‘Black River Running #18’ (2024) 270 X 207 X 32 cm, foam, epoxy paint on canvas
As quickly becomes evident, the works are not actually extravagant impasto, a somewhat comic expressionism, but rather an ingeniously constructed arrangement in polyurethane foam and epoxy paint. The constituent balls or dollops were all individually fashioned and positioned upon a carefully reinforced canvas, the whole secured with many coats of sprayed epoxy undercoat, eventually completed in a black semi-gloss finish.
What is most notable upon closer inspection is the absence of any sense of gesture or application, given that this is ostensibly ‘a painting’. This too offers vivid contrast with the fluctuating surfaces of the silver wall. The ‘black’ in Black River Running is certainly in evidence but not much seems to be running at this point. Sediment or something akin looms as an issue. Indeed, the absence of motion in turn suggests something vaguely vegetative or organic to the forms. It may be irrelevant, but Nelson is also a keen gardener.
Detail to ‘Black River Running’ #16 (2023-24) 210 X 162 X 26 cm, foam, epoxy paint on canvas
The elaborate simulation nevertheless refers to oil paint at its most lavish or gross, if only by adhering to a canvas. But it does so while once again offering Nelson opportunity to display impressive ingenuity, patient assembly and a virtuosity that effectively undermines a reading as simply expressive disgust. What is expressed may be something more fundamental. The contrasting walls could be thought of as the artist’s two poles for painting, one to studied deference to photographic sources, the other to chaotic abandon without them, implicitly as a move toward sculpture. In this respect, the expression is closer to something like anxiety or frustration for one’s options. Works and show gain from a more structural reading.
This is to consider the new work in light of the artist’s development or her overall project. To look outside of that, more generally to current painting, the emphasis upon the expressive value to materials is interesting for its focus upon structure rather than content or subject matter, suggests an alternative to a global iconography and its many present adherents, here in Melbourne and elsewhere. The weight of photographic conventions there need not be measured in merely slavish diligence or trompe l’oeil. Nelson’s approach certainly belongs to no discernible trend for the moment, but this broadening of formal issues could yet prompt welcome new directions in painting.
IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND ANNA SCHWARZ GALLERY
My thanks to both for help in preparing this review.
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