TONY LLOYD - 'Nocturnalux'

MARS Gallery - 7th May - 7th June 2025

The artist returns for his fourth solo show at MARS and thirty-second in a career stretching back to 1996 and his student days at the RMIT. The artist’s beginnings were actually in the Neo-Expressionist style but this was quickly abandoned for a cooler, more detached approach. Since then he has built a repertory of recognisable themes, snow-capped mountain peaks, desolate country roads (mostly by night) owls, solitary housing, floating spacemen and dark forests, often in vibrant monochrome.

The show’s title suggests comfort, even luxury for the night traveller, although the artist intended ‘lux’ (latin for light) to just denote the quality of illumination while driving at night.

Nocturnalux (2025) 46 X 81 cm, oil on canvas

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The show comprises ten works; mostly modest easel-size and dwelling upon the deserted country road bend by various hours and monochromes.

Dead Reckoning (2025) 81 X 122 oil on canvas

Two exceptions are the slightly larger landscapes, Skull Rock (2025) and Millowl Stones (2025). While contrasting in locations and dynamics they nevertheless share a marked sense of wilderness or desolation.

Skull Rock (2025) 71 X 152 cm oil on canvas

Interestingly, both are ambiguous in scale of subject, the cave in Skull Rock (also known as Cleft Island, south west of Wilson’s Promontory) could comfortably accommodate The Sydney Opera House. But there is nothing to indicate this scale in the picture. If anything treatment of the sea suggests something much smaller.

Over the years, consistency to such remote subjects unmistakably acquires an underlying sense of isolation and retreat. This is not of course a reflection on the artist’s private life, but rather a romantic preference for the uninhabited and uninhabitable. Yet a fierce focus upon the grandeur of nature, if it is not to simply lapse into calendar art, at a certain point must register something distinctive in an attitude to the rest of the world, perhaps as a vantage point from which to regard one’s standing there, perhaps some perspective upon the whole troubled notion of nature.

For Lloyd this attitude is established by a style that emphasises photographic sources, modesty of scale and a smooth, immaculate surface. These assume an expressive tone of calculated detachment, from a bolder signature to painting, from a closer engagement in life.

The Improbability of Love (2023) 91 X 53 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

By the early 2000s, the artist’s inspiration had shifted to the work of Gerhard Richter with its blurring to photographic sources signalling motion or focal depth. For Richter, this is painting’s way of pointing to photographic sources, of claiming painterly means as his signature.

Shh (2005) 25 X 20 cm, oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

Richter also advanced the style of Photorealism by using private or family photos. Lloyd soon augments these with movie sources and in the current show the journeys down dark roads still carry a hint of narrative and ‘film noir’. Shhh (2005) was derived from a still from the 1943 Hollywood horror movie The Seventh Victim and the actress Jean Brooks. A surprisingly lurid source, given the artist’s austere aesthetic

Eighty Five (2025) 51 X 66 cm oil on canvas

A further expansion of subject matter lay with science fiction photography and movies. In The Distant Shore (2008) the source of the flying saucer is an amateur UFO witness, in other works, space stations and floating spacemen toy with the authenticity of photographic sources. Photographs are not necessarily a source of realism.

The Distant Shore (2008) 30 X 40 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

This then leads to a number of interesting plays upon photographic timings or shutter speeds, determining focus and motion. These can give events an absurd frozen quality, a futuristic, implausible time scale for shutter speed, indeed vantage point for direct observation. as in Farmer with Asteroid (2018).

Farmer with Asteroid (2018) 30 X 40 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

The work retains a subtle soft focus and smooth finish of photography and an historical black and white print format, acquires a whimsical Surrealist tone.

A following development was to incorporate advances in digital photography and its seamless integration with graphics in software like Adobe Photoshop. Digital photography offers far greater flexibility, exchanging print dot matrices for pixels, film stock speeds for a more powerful sensor and allowing images to be directly projected onto a painting surface, easing and simplifying the transcription from print to painting.

In 2018 Lloyd co-organised an exhibition at the RMIT ‘Analogue Art in a Digital World’ and lecture with colleague Sam Leach, dealing with the adoption of digital technology in the process of painting. There will be few artists these days (painters and otherwise) that do not take advantage of digital resources.

Yet it has to be said these digital qualities are by no means obvious in Lloyd’s and colleagues’ work. The immaculate painted finish and whimsical composites of say, meteorites and landscapes, have a respectable pedigree in art history extending from the glazed surfaces of Jan Van Eyck to literary and mythic subjects that can be traced through artists such as Nicolas Poussin to Jean-Louis Ingres to Salvador Dali.

Lloyd’s point was that certain digital prints bring with them preference for colour casts or settings and tracing mannerisms, particularly to figures. But these were already available from analogue photographic sources, earlier forms of projection.

A Short History of Lost Time (2007) 100 X 300 cm overall, oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

The issue of painting’s relation to photography is best considered through the developments of Pop Art and its successor, Photorealism. The distinction between the greater resources of painting – as a work of sole instance - and prints – as works of multiple instances - establishes a crucial distinction and in stark counterpoint to the polemics of full abstraction in painting and its quest for intrinsic qualities. Where Pop and Photorealism establish differences through a close display of print qualities (graphic and photographic) painting discovers a new dead-pan attitude, a mocking formalist rigour to scale and composition. Painting finds ways to step back from prints and their world, through vital relational qualities. This less heralded basis for painting’s priority places the role of painting mainly in the larger realm of pictures and drives much of its subsequent Post Modernism.

The movement of Hyperrealism – more correctly, Hyper-Photorealism - in which paintings insert greater, often implausible resolution or focus to a subject, certainly suggest improvements to photographic equipment and projection, although not necessarily digital. And despite the misnomer Hyperrealism quickly reveals limitations. While excelling in portraiture, results tend to impose an excessive rigidity, acceptable for stereotypes or ideals but a taxidermist’s aesthetic for individuals. This is something Lloyd has possibly been aware of since probing shutter speed or exposure duration to an image, starting with the split second approach to portraiture, and is wisely not tempted in this direction. Moreover Hyperrealism proves of limited application. Mists and night skies for example fall outside its brief. In this sense, subjects are no more reliable for realism than their treatments in digital photographs and graphics.

For Lloyd and colleagues these difficulties may prove short term. It may be too early to properly assess the full range of software applications and their opportunities for painting. And it may be that this allegiance to digital graphics is a generational phase. The adherence to supposed photographic qualities, to nuances of focus, surface and colour separation for example, possibly provide some sort of reassurance for the painter unwilling to venture more from painting in way of a signature, more from photographic sources in way of experience.

The Artist on The Matterhorn, 2023 [NOT IN SHOW]

In recent years the artist has included seemingly unedited photographs of himself before actual mountain peaks, here and overseas on his Instagram account. He is an enthusiastic mountaineer. Whether these will become paintings remains to be seen. Significantly, Lloyd places himself in uninhabitable wilderness, confirming a private preference (figuratively at least). This placement also underlines the improbability of painting such subjects from direct observation. Crucially, paintings from these actual peaks use filtered or simplified digital graphics, at times mocking the coincidence between graphic rendition and observable detail under weather conditions and vantage point.

Matterhorn and Moon (2024) 30 X 45 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

Mount Buffalo Plateau (2024) 36 X 81 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

Lloyd’s modesty of means (most works are around 30 X 40 cm) belies a subtlety and sophistication that addresses important issues for both the current state of painting and a signature style and identity. This show is firmly recommended.