PETER WESTWOOD - 'The New Way to Live'

BLOCKPROJECTS - 14^th May – 8^th June 2024

A compact show of nine oil paintings ranging from easel size to large (160 X 190cm) marks the artist’s first solo show in Melbourne since 2017. It is also an introduction to the gallery’s new shopfront premises at 759 Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn. While a reduction in floor space is notable after its Richmond address, Director Jeremy Kibel points out wall space actually remains more or less the same. Two walls devoted to windows at the Richmond address ultimately proved too much of a luxury. While the new address is in a very smart hospitality and retail strip, it is also some distance from Melbourne’s established arts precincts in the city centre, in Richmond and Collingwood and may signal a shift in demographics or business practice. Jeremy is to be commended for bold enterprise.

The show is titled ‘The New Way To Live’ and while this obviously contains a measure of irony and hyperbole, nevertheless a sweeping change is announced at some level and works are firstly more abstract, tend to be simplified yet more agitated in facture or brushwork, more elliptical in source or content - indeed often literally - with the disks of ‘Double Act’ (2024) and ‘Spooky Action’ (2023) providing ellipses in curious pairings, suggestive perhaps of a person or couple at some remove.

‘Double Act’ (2024) 71 X 62cm oil on canvas

‘Spooky Action’ (2023) 160 X 190cm oil on canvas

The work maintains a sense of interiors, of perspectival planes and subdued palette while juggling more stylised or graphic elements, these providing a kind of stability in counterpoint to seething brushwork to grounds or fill. The two often share an uneasy overlap; so that graphics can seem a little casual or wonky in places while brushwork then feels cramped or cautious. The friction presumably alludes to activity within the interiors. And this avoidance of more directly stated figures or persons would seem very much part of a new direction.

‘Falling Off the Floor’ (2024) 135 X 180cm oil on canvas

The standout is ‘Falling Off the Floor’ (2024) which, despite the title, depicts a ceiling upon which three robotic figures seem to shuffle in various directions, illuminated by a central blue light. The inspiration may well have been office sprinklers or perhaps fans, but the point has been to distance any literal or concrete reading and to deal in something more obscure or arcane, to radically re-orientate – as the title urges – one’s sense of space and even gravity. Here the writhing masses of red and lavender do not so much signal some graphic technique as register something like anxiety or frustration. It is the gestures of painting uncomfortably corralled to the requirements of illustration.

The work perhaps broaches Surrealism in this pursuit of quirky fantasy but at the same time abstracts the very terms of the fantasy, grows distant or detached, formal in surprising ways. Then again, much of the content derives from graphics, and with that, classes of prints or genres. Indeed, the introduction of text or signage to works in the show declares a new, more forthright allegiance to this graphic realm and a project distinct from Surrealism.

‘The Show of Delights’ (2023) 166 X 126cm oil on canvas

The artist is a discreet but respected presence to the Melbourne art scene, with an exhibition record stretching back to the eighties, represented in public collections and winner of the 2016 Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, a senior lecturer at The RMIT School of Art, included in many overseas curated shows, in fact the artist’s recent travels to Europe in part account for the pause in his local exposure. Westwood is also a critic, noted for catalogue essays, strongly informed by current art theory. His engagement with formal issues, with the role of painting in imagery, is thus thoroughgoing and longstanding. The gallery website provides a short video in which the artist covers various general points on the role of painting. Yet much of Westwood’s inclinations and convictions stem from the very beginning of his career and to appreciate more fully how the present show represents a departure, it is helpful to consider his past development.

Westwood attended art school at a time when Photo-Realism enjoyed brief popularity and soon prompted an abiding dissatisfaction with the literal and obvious. He then turned to more symbolic or allegorical modes, to darker, more obscure themes, these coinciding with the rise of Neo-Expressionism and Post Modernism in the early eighties.

‘Not Just Ignorant but Stupid’ (1986) 133 X 174cm acrylic and pastel on paper [Not In Show]

But before long even the romantic and literary seem pedestrian and as the title ‘Not Just Ignorant but Stupid’ perhaps hints, the artist was soon over it. By the early nineties he retreated to abstraction in works such as ‘Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) (1991) a work acquired by the NGV and marking an important advance in his career.

‘Sturm und Drang [Storm and Stress]’ (1991) 198 X 183cm oil and found objects on canvas

[Not In Show]

However this is followed by something like a ten year hiatus, in which time the artist’s gallery closes, he starts a family and adds to teaching duties with curating The RMIT Project Space. It is only in the early noughties that he resumes painting and takes stock of changes in the art world and his options. This was the era in which Post Colonialism largely succeeded Post Modernism, particularly in Australia, while the influence of Luc Tuymans and a wave of following artists, including Wilhelm Sasnal, Eberhard Haverkost and Thomas Scheibitz stake out a practice in which painting identifies and largely ridicules (or deconstructs) standard photographic genres, particularly in the mass media, auditing expressive options for painting into the bargain. Whether this phase ought still to be regarded as Post Modernism or more lazily, as merely ‘Contemporary’ we can leave for another time.

In Australia, the influence of Tuymans is typically felt superficially, diluted with American artists such as Elizabeth Peyton and quickly succumbs to the faux naïf and sentimental. For Westwood there is the option for returning to figuration – even to photographic sources – while retaining a formal detachment, a sceptical engagement.

‘Pep Talk’ (2003) 83 X 123cm oil on canvas [Not In Show]

A work such as ‘Pep Talk’ (2003) for example can toy with graphics and diagram while still accommodating the concrete and traditional. An altogether lighter mood and manner soon finds the artist switching subjects from hunting trophy photos (a genre) to urban demolition or destruction to the comic comparison between himself and British art critic of the day, Matthew Collings, to a perhaps surprisingly adept portrait of Tuymans at the time of controversy concerning Tuymans’ photographic sources.

‘The Painting, The Photograph, The Whole Shebang’ (2015) 50.5 X 60.5cm oil on canvas

[Not In Show]

By the second decade to the new century the latitude granted painting and the painterly by Westwood does not so much highlight a category or genre as use it as springboard for more obscure or elusive reference. His winning entry in the 2016 Bayside Painting Prize, ‘Passivity After An Episode From A Fight’ (2015) finds the artist in deliberate retreat both from an obvious photo genre (public disturbance selfie) and predictable or confident painting technique. The artist’s touch is typically thin, brittle, tentative. The passivity to the prone figure here is in comic contrast with a riot of stylisation and improvisation. The artist’s sense of humour has only sharpened with the years.

‘Passivity After An Episode From A Fight’ (2015) 149 X 79cm oil on canvas [Not In Show]

Many of the artist’s sources from this time derive from images encountered on his mobile phone and tend to be massaged in Photoshop, but increasingly the sheer profusion of images enabled by the digital world render the concept of genre hopelessly overtaxed or trivial. Overseas proponents of the project also struggle to maintain momentum at a certain point, find themselves trapped in their own mannerisms, a prisoner to their styles. No project of any vigour lasts long in any case. Westwood is happy to toy with anecdote and cartoon, in works such as ‘Caught Up’ (2017) but for him progress lies with a more scattered yet intensely linear composition.

‘Caught Up’ (2017) 153 X 91.5cm oil on canvas [Not In Show]

Interestingly, he arrives at a process of abstraction not intent upon exclusive self-reference or a demonstration of merely intrinsic properties for painting or pictures, but to something more cryptic in content, more wayward in allusion, something overlooked in current discussions on the role of painting. The New Way To Live nails his convictions to the mast on this, and the show is worthwhile both for this general point as well as refining his particular voice or touch, and allowing us to reflect on a little more art history. One can hardly ask more from a show.