Exhibition: Sweet Spot

Elizabeth Pulie
Untitled (2 Massive flowers) 2008
synthetic polymer paint, oil stick on canvas
120 x 100 cm
© Courtesy the artist

To go to an exhibition of modern art is to inevitably encounter works that comment about art and its purposes. It's also a commonplace that artists these days talk to other artists rather than to a broader audience. But these trends are not a bad thing at all if the conversation is interesting enough to eavesdrop on.

Sweet Spot, an exhibition currently at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Parkville, reveals the work of six artists concerned with the meanings and aesthestics of ornamentation. All the artists are interested in how art looks and feels, enabling the viewer to experience their work on different levels.

Elizabeth Pulie uses ornamentation to confound the distinctions between the abstract and the figurative, the 'real' and the imagined. The shapes and patterns in her work are hugely vibrant yet they draw on motifs recognisable from the domestic world of sewing and embroidery, as well as patterns of dots sometimes reminiscent of Indigenous art. Her works provide a sensory experience that is above all enjoyable.

The fluid, sometimes floral shapes are often not recognisable as 'nature' yet they pulse with life and movement. The works play with shape and perspective, and the use of colour is adventurous, in pleasing combinations that hint at 'vintage' colour schemes.

'Show', for example, rendered in gouache and pencil, includes eye motifs that remind the viewer of buttons and lace patterns, but the overall image suggests a kaleidoscopic view that is constantly shifting.

'Signature painting' is reminiscent of a sophisticated, avant-garde patchwork quilt. Shapes with floral patterns could be pieces of material while other markings reference stitching. The floral shapes are marked out by curved lines, one of them with markings that suggest a tape measure. The pale colour scheme is soothing and the overall effect one of aesthetic pleasure.

In a very different way, Canberra artist Marie Hegarty's work also plays with the border between the abstract and the figurative. Her large canvases are dominated by huge, cartoon-like forms that loosely suggest body parts and are defined with bold fields of flat colour, particularly black, shades of red and pastel colours. These organic forms also create the illusion that the work is three dimensional. They're visually very striking, suggesting that they are still becoming, yet to fully define themselves.

The work of the late Neil Roberts offers unadulterated pleasure. In a series of five sculptures that could be seen as a nod to Art Nouveau, he uses leadlight to uncover an unexpected grace and beauty in the movements of two competing boxers devoid of faces, the movement of their bodies marking out an ever-changing space between them.

The leadlight's black against the gallery's white wall creates a lacelike delicacy and beauty. This contrasts with the subject and the pugilistic titles of these works, for example 'Crossguard to the left', 'A foul pivot' and 'Left hand blow for the head'.

Opulence, excess and sexual desire are all evoked in the oversized jewellery sculptures of Melbourne artist Kevin Maritz. Giant necklaces made from aluminium, timber and steel hang from 'hooks' made of, in one case, decorative bowls that resemble breasts and in others coils that suggest genitalia, evoking the bodies that jewellery such as this is supposed to adorn. The seductiveness of these pieces hints at the way in which human sexuality festishises objects -- the association between the object and the body may seem contingent, yet it's nevertheless evident in the languid luxuriousness of these 'necklaces'.

Peter Kennedy's gumtrees, using watercolour, gouache, charcoal and pastel on paper, take the tree out of art history and into the present, removing it from its expected context and rendering it astonishing. Each of the works features one tree in black and white that suggests a photographic negative. The trees are surrounded by wild brushstrokes in unexpected colours, further defamiliarising them. This technique highlights the inherent beauty of their twisted limbs and their individual differences.

The works of Adrienne Gaha, a Sydney artist who lives in London, are the only in the exhibition that directly eschew beauty. Gaha comments on the Rococo tradition by superimposing figures from modern popular culture on images from the work of Francois Boucher, a celebrated Rococo artist whose works present idyllic, highly idealised scenes that have been described as superficial.

I didn't warm to these works but perhaps I wasn't supposed to. The disruption of 'high art' beauty by 'low art' popular culture questions the greater worth attributed to the former -- perhaps the sometimes ugly modern images are psychologically more cognisant of the range of human emotions and motivations than is the limited elegance of Boucher's work. Gaha suggests that some forms of aestheticism may come at a cost!

In a less overtly disruptive way, Tony Clark re-imagines classical and renaissance figuration, rendering it painterly and deliberately widening the gap between representation and 'reality'.

His 'Putto night' and 'Putto day' feature renaissance putti (decorative images of young children) from the Medici chapel, while 'Standing 2008' shows a naked male figure from the the Portland Vase, a 1st century Roman glass vase made famous in the 18th century.

The unusual and dramatic colourations and deliberate sense of the works being 'unfinished' (broad brushstrokes and visible drips of paint) undercut the traditions the original figures evoke. They force us to see the figures as a function of the act of painting rather than as being in any way lifelike. But it is difficult to generalise about the effects of this practice -- the putti seem less lifelike, the standing male figure more alive and dynamic, reminding me of the 1954 oil painting of Frank O'Hara by Larry Rivers, in which the poet strikes a quasi-classical pose.

Sweet Spot is at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 800 Swanston St (between Faraday and Elgin streets) Parkville, until 24 May.