PETER NEILSON - 'Held in The Gaze of A Stranger'
AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES – 22nd Oct – 9th Nov 2024
In the interests of transparency and full disclosure, I hereby declare the artist a friend and colleague, from way back in the days painting backdrops and sets for local television shows like Hey, Hey It’s Saturday and Sale of The Century. Later, in the workshop and famed backlot of popular soap opera Neighbours, regular discussions on art occurred. We have stayed in touch.
The artist returns to familiar concerns in a show of fifteen grand panoramas of mysterious figures in the corridors of power, this after last year’s surprising digression into hand-printed verse, ‘Drawing On What Has Already Been Suggested’. Now in his eightieth year, ‘Held in the Gaze of a Stranger’ is Neilson’s twenty-first show with the gallery, across its Melbourne and Sydney addresses, since joining the stable in 2002. The show is accompanied by a symposium (26th Oct) on the topic ‘The Task of Painting Today: The Work of Peter Neilson’ featuring a range of academics, drawn from philosophy, art history and cinema. The event, initiated by Macquarie University, Sydney and in parallel with an ongoing documentary on the artist, underlines the esteem in which the artist is held in select quarters, the ambition and scope the work has quietly achieved.
NB – CLICK ON IMAGES FOR ENLARGEMENT
Standing in the Doorway (2023) 92 X 190 cm oil on canvas
Commentary on the work typically identifies a sinister undertone and fragmentary narrative that recall film noir or pulp fiction. Figures are essentially genre stereotypes or stock characters, while settings provide labyrinthine, in places paradoxical spatial continuity. The sense is of a remote, almost Olympian detachment initially directed upon a world of big business, august institutions and related ‘after hours’ activities. More recently this world has taken on a sharper political and military tenor with terrorist groups and espionage themes and the impression is more of ‘history painting’ pursuing contemporary myth. The work is notable for striking shifts of scale, figures at times reduced to no more than dolls or tokens, while architecture juggles periods and fixtures, oscillates between the pre-digital age of vast paper documents and bulky televisions and contemporary times where computers and mobile phones are in evidence. An ahistorical or Post-Modern aesthetic would seem to operate.
The Night They Crossed the Border (Having to Leave, Having to Return) (2021) 150 X 300 cm oil on canvas
While seemingly focussed upon the world of the rich and powerful, many related events are then strangely absent. The sponsor’s marquee at sporting and civic events, the riotous parties aboard massive luxury ‘yachts’ in exotic ports, private jets and attendant limousines, flirtation with newest celebrities, exclusive holiday resorts and glamorous charity ceremonies all curiously find no place in this world of supreme power, although all would lend themselves to the brusque melodramatic treatment.
The focus to the work is actually narrower and the almost exclusive devotion to interiors and night nudge us to perhaps a less literal reading, as not just interior but internal to this world; its inner workings where darkness does not simply denote an afterhours agenda but something more mysterious and only dimly grasped. This reading accents psychological rather than socio-political mores.
Subject matter then deals in not so much a fractured thriller as a strictly compartmentalised frame of mind, its many players or roles not always on the same page, in the same room or even building, but frequently caught in furtive adjustments, diminished circumstances. It is very much a man’s world and workplace in its many phases. There are no kitchens or bedrooms, dining rooms or lounges, significantly. Encounters with the occasional femme fatale or socialite fit in there somehow but it is a mindset anxious to gloss details, add to the excitement while distancing itself. The appeal to theatrical gestures, melodramatic lighting and shadows urge artifice to the arrangement; perhaps nod to Neilson’s background as a television scenic artist, moving unobtrusively between studio sets, adjusting for priorities, an eye on continuity.
Subject matter then deals in not so much a fractured thriller as a strictly compartmentalised frame of mind, its many players or roles not always on the same page, in the same room or even building, but frequently caught in furtive adjustments, diminished circumstances. It is very much a man’s world and workplace in its many phases. There are no kitchens or bedrooms, dining rooms or lounges, significantly. Encounters with the occasional femme fatale or socialite fit in there somehow but it is a mindset anxious to gloss details, add to the excitement while distancing itself. The appeal to theatrical gestures, melodramatic lighting and shadows urge artifice to the arrangement; perhaps nod to Neilson’s background as a television scenic artist, moving unobtrusively between studio sets, adjusting for priorities, an eye on continuity.
Painting the Two-Timing Two-Way Mirror as News Arrives From Pandemonium (2021) 100 X 185 cm oil on canvas
But while atmosphere, treatment and palette confer a persuasive unity, it is the conspicuous shifts to spatial continuity and scale that animate figures, point to a persistent incompatibility and rigidity to roles. The compartments never quite cohere; figures remain a niche convenience that can have no greater agency or substance. This structure to the work has been in place for some time and it is helpful to look to its beginnings.
Incident on Your Street (1993) 200 X 200 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
Incident on Your Street (1993) already displays the dizzying slides to perspective and jumps in scale. The stairs on the right ‘bend’ in depth as they descend, while the figure in the doorway in the lower corner offers a radical reduction in scale, if understood as placed on the landing. The construction has an almost M. C. Escher-like ingenuity yet the artist’s influences arise from British Pop Art, R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007) and Michael Andrews (1928-19995) in particular. It is their dispersed figure compositions, especially in Andrews’ All Night Long (1963-4) and Deer Park (1962) that prompt Neilson to look at ways of spreading activity across the whole of the picture plane yet linking them architecturally. And the arrangement cannot help but shape the way we view the figures. They are caught up in shifting circumstances that render their tasks futile, absurd. Shifts in scale to figures further alert us to their ambiguous, not to say ambivalent relations. They belong to different moments possibly, to different places to an extent and the arrangement essentially excuses them of closer involvement, of any more sustained presence.
The artist hits upon something more than just the conceits of descriptive geometry and is able to craft from it a workplace with its divisions of duties, lapses in attention, fleeting distractions, evasions and misunderstandings. Compartmentalisation would be a minor insight except that Neilson cannot resist spatial contradictions that flaw the arrangement, giving moments and places a troubling isolation no amount of darkness can disguise. In this the artist stakes out a singular territory, but more impressive has been his ability to expand upon its formal foundations and social perspective, to add new and knowing levels of involvement and detachment.
The Two-Way Mirror (Cinderella as Spy - Never Suspected She Loved Happily Ever After the Overthrow of the Prince’s Brutal Junta) (2007-8) 185 X 200 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
Later works, such as The Two-Way Mirror (Cinderella as Spy - Never Suspected She Loved Happily Ever After the Overthrow of the Prince’s Brutal Junta) (2007-8) grant the architectural slippage an arch pictorial aspect with the white frames of photographs toying with the scale and integration with furnishings. Compartments thus extend to planes, some figures achieve three-dimensionality at the expense of others. This gives proceedings a diminished, playful detachment. Equally, offers a more comfortable, remote vantage point.
Trapped Inside Happiness (Tick Tock) (2011) 150 X 300 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
In a work such as Trapped Inside Happiness (Tick Tock) (2011) the white framed photographs are now augmented with window frames and doorways, adding to the confusion and compartmenting. Fine white lines, understood as either laser beams or an on-screen graphic, either way serve as diversion and division. The arrangement literally gains in breadth and complexity, offers a busier more diffuse workplace but retreats to a further lofty vantage point.
Chiasmus (Red Zone- Access Denied - Green Light Deleted) (2022) 100 X 185 cm oil on canvas
More recently, work has grown gentler in colour harmonies, looser in modelling, and as noted, with a topical, militant tone. The workplace now effortlessly extends to a rumbling world at large. It is also notable for greater prominence given to figures with a paintbrush (see lower right to Chiasmus (Red Zone- Access Denied - Green Light Deleted) and hovering or ascending figures (see Becoming Lighter than Air). The work is altogether more accommodating of marginal activities. The workplace now surveys scenes of armed combat, civic unrest, seductive betrayals and discreet editing of photographs, for an equally diffuse attention to workflow.
The figure of the painter is introduced as a part of the making and mixing of circumstances, an acknowledgement of a more expansive view of pictures. Figures now occasionally float free of settings, as a further, perhaps celestial concession. The work attains a sweeping generosity on the place of pictures and the worlds they make. Nothing could be more timely to contemporary art.
Becoming Lighter Than Air (2022) 100 X 185 cm oil on canvas
However, like stable-mate John Anderson, Neilson’s work is strangely absent from public collections, local curated surveys, from the many grants, scholarships and residencies that drive greater recognition. Australian Galleries’ reputation rests with the private sector, with the tastes of individual clients and collectors and Neilson’s place there has been shrewdly steered by gallery director Stuart Purves to steadily rising prices. But at this stage some greater context needs to be established for the work, whatever the policies of the public sector. The symposium is a step in that direction. ‘The Role of Painting’ goes to the heart of the matter, although may need more than contrast with video to properly claim a public agenda.
