STEPHEN PLEBAN - 'Animal Tracks'

Gallerysmith – 26th March – 18th April 2026




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A show of nine canvases, ranging from large (153 X 138 cm) to easel-size (61 X 58 cm) finds the artist picking up where he left off with last year’s show, ‘Seeing The Light’. Infact the artist’s imagery has been consistent throughout the twenties, an approach to figures in a landscape that pits a highly schematic setting and figures against a vigourous gestural treatment. This amounts to an adamant insistence upon the private, expressive quality of pigment application contrasting with imagery mostly sourced from the media and internet.

'Another Green World' (2025) 168 X 153 cm oil, wax on canvas

The artist is prolific, showing annually in Melbourne and Sydney (Martin Browne) and the popularity of the work rests with an essentially romantic approach. This has for some time dealt with a retreat or reverie in a remote idyll or sublime. It has quietly become a key genre for contemporary painting. It derives from Peter Doig’s scenes of holiday resorts in the early 90s that gradually allow more mythic and cinematic content. A key feature is the casually traced photo-source from a projector, maintaining proportion to figures but simplifying and rounding outline. This delivers a deliberate and expressive quality, a passive or tentative profile. Person and place never quite rendered with detail or conviction, a dimly remembered holiday. The pictures thus deal in a distancing from the scene, a kind of recreational sublime.


‘Holocene I’ (2025) 61 X 56cm oil, wax on canvas

This feature to the drawing is reflected in a number of following artists that include Michael Armitage, Hurvin Anderson, Till Gerhard and early Daniel Richter. Locally, the influence is variously felt in the work of Adam Lee, Seth Birchall and Tim McMonagle, amongst others. Initially the trend appeared to be an exclusively male preserve, but recently, artists such as Dutchwoman Lorian Gwynne and American Melanie Daniel make distinctive departures. What is distinctive in Pleban’s approach is the prominence assigned gesture in counterpoint to the radical reduction of landscape and figure to something like a blunt template. Here, there is nothing dreamy or whimsical, tentative or diffident in the artist’s approach, but rather the opposite. It poses an aggressive resistance to idyll, an insistence upon the making of the schema or template, as if reluctant to comply or conform. And it is this curious tension between an easy, curvilinear composition and a reckless, pouncing application of paint and beeswax, that gives the work its uneasy meaning and potency.

‘Honey Hunters I’ (2025) 153 X 138 cm oil, wax on canvas

There is, in other words, a lot more riding upon it than merely the artist’s need for direct, physical expression. The work addresses a contemporary genre with candour and conviction, concerning firstly technical resources, for painting’s options in responding to photographic and particularly web-sourced imagery, secondly, aesthetic concerns with attitude and context. 

Does the artist have other options? Obviously, the artist (b. 1965) is well-versed in matters of craft, with a Bachelor of Arts from The VCA (1982-86 – an interrupted course) and furthered with a post-graduate year at Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam (1995) and while uninclined to dwell on art theory, absorbs much of this through a close monitoring of the painting of contemporaries. So, there are options. But if he wishes to engage with a key issue for painting and art at present and to stake his place by that, then other options are not an option. 

The theme of animal care and companionship is central to the work, and with it the wish to be in accord with nature at its most animal, in tune with both wild and tame animals, with the rhythm of season, weather and hour, and place, no matter how romanticised. Talk of attunement and rhythm, naturally suggests music and references like the title ‘Music for Animals V’ (2025) in the current show as well as ‘Another Green World’ (2025) alluding to Brian Eno’s 1975 album of ambient music, point to an abiding interest in the music of his formative years, in rock and indie genres. While the artist does not play an instrument, music remains an important model for more allusive structure to the painting. The title of the show. ‘Animal Tracks’ (the title of a song by folk trio Mountain Man) might equally be taken as music ‘tracks’ inspired by animals, just as their tracks in the earth offer metaphor for the artist’s progress or process. This linking of theme to treatment is what gives the work surprising depth.

‘New Breed’ (2025-6) 153 X 138 cm oil and wax on canvas.

Central to the treatment is the artist’s use of beeswax, not in a traditional encaustic, where it is warmed to a thickened liquid and mixed with dry pigments plus resin (usually damar). The painted surface may be variously warmed or cooled for effect before a heat source is passed over the surface, fusing painting and wax. Much of this technique was introduced to Pleban’s by his VCA lecturer, the Englishman, John Walker. However, in Pleban’s case the wax is merely softened to a pliable, putty-like consistency and then applied by hand to the painting, with some abandon. The wax has a translucence that allows underpainting to remain visible and in turn for thinner coats of paint to then tint the white wax. The effect is not unlike modelling paste for consistency and translucence.

What this does for the painting is to give them an almost sculptural value, that records not only the handling but the emphatic lumps or clots that defuse the smooth, curvilinear design; not rendering a third dimension or depth, but rather a process that renders the design inadequate or compromised. The effect is to given the most primitive of gestures a place in a broader scheme, conversely, to give even the most casual scheme scope for physical intimacy. It is a two-way arrangement. 

‘Giant Tree Hunter II’ (2020-3) 183 X 168 cm oil, wax on canvas [cropped image, NOT IN SHOW]

In a work such as ‘Giant Tree Hunter II’ (2020-3) from the 2024 'A Wild Kindness' show, the technique ingeniously finds its content in the gnarled trunk of an enormous tree, beside which a figure passively regards the aged specimen. The figure might also stand for the artist, caught up in his own process, struggling for more perspective or design.

In other work this attention to clots or spots is pursued to something like fantasy snow flakes in ‘Night Herder’ (2025) and ‘Animal Tracks’ (2025) perhaps the standout, with its shower of flakes directed upon an almost Biblical figure carrying a saddle and leading a horse.

'Animal Tracks' (2025) 153 X 138 cm oil, wax on canvas

Here the linear template yields to something like a pointillist ray or shower, not so much subverting the design as reconciling a restrained private engagement with a schematic idyll. Many of the scenes feature children (some, the artist’s grandchildren) and while internet images may often stir the artist’s imagination, occasionally the sources are more autobiographical, as is the case in ‘Thinking Of a Place (Artist As A Boy)’ (2023-4) based on a childhood photograph taken in rural Victoria. Interestingly, the formal features of curved design and a range of blobs and spots remains consistent, although this had less to do with responding to media imagery, than furthering a remote idyll now on personal terms.

One final work to the show merits comment and that is the reworking of Pieter Breughel, The Elder’s ‘Hunters In The Snow’ [Jagers in de Sneeuw] (1565), here given a predictably cursory compression, omitting hillside village and skaters on a pond, to reduce the composition to a more static pair of hunters in updated costume and just three, equally static hounds. Such an obvious pre-modernist icon immediately flags a post-modernist agenda, and a surprising departure for the artist. It is one thing to run a critical eye over nature at its most romanticised, it is quite another to turn one’s attention to art and an august tradition.


Pieter Breughel The Elder – 'Hunters in The Snow' (1565) 117 X 162 cm oil on wood panel
(courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

‘Hunters In The Snow’ (2025) 153 X 138 cm oil, wax, oil stick on canvas

It is not that the artist wants to measure up to Brueghel, but rather to measure Breughel down to one of Pleban’s comfortable templates and the calculation is uneasy at best. The artist surely senses that this is the farthest reach of his project to date, a risk worth taking but reaching a standstill. The stasis to hunters and hounds in his version essentially signals the limits of his engagement with tradition. The shower of sprinkles that fall, significantly upon an empty pond, is the artist at his most accommodating, but finds no home or hero in the distance of Breughel, in the scope of hunters in snow. The marks are, in this respect, wistful, in a way quite different to the rest of Pleban’s work. It remains to be seen whether art will be pursued further, now that his confidence in nature allows him a glance over his shoulder.

The show thus marks something of a turning point in the artist’s development and is warmly recommended.

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALLERYSMITH

Thanks to both for help in preparing this review.

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