Daryl Austin by Wendy Walker, 2004
'Painting can be a conversation with oneself and at the same time, it can be a conversation with other paintings. What one does, triggers thoughts of what others have done or might do...This introduces a degree of play between the possible and the necessary, which can allow one to learn from other artists' work that might seem otherwise unrelated or irrelevant.' 1
Richly detailed and highly personal, exuding a sense of stillness, Daryl Austin's realist paintings quietly, yet resoundingly articulate the world of the painter. Eschewing the illusion of real space which characterised the Studio Paintings series of 1998, in the shallow pictorial space of this new body of work, Austin directs the viewer into the nucleus of the painter's studio, selectively framing his pictures within a picture, as little is revealed and much concealed.
In a 1996 interview, Richard Serra described Jasper Johns (and his work) as 'a feast of colliding thoughts, a huge continual, revolving process, picking up the pieces and dovetailing as it moves along...a person who hasn't closed the sequence.'2 Similarly, Austin has yet to 'close the sequence' and this latest body of work continues an enduring and evolving dialogue - resonant with art-historical references - concerning the act, the condition of painting.
Etched with the legend 'heart to hand' and 'eye to mind,' Painter's Credo - a pair of antique spectacles from Austin's 2003 solo exhibition Here then, now there - provides an insight into the contrary impulses of reason and emotion that are central to his narrative. This duality is succinctly encapsulated in the work Painting Fetish/Self Portrait, wherein the artist is glimpsed in sober reflection and the artist's palette is bestrewn with hair in lieu of paint. In his idiosyncratic world of paradoxes and perversities, a painting, which is already hidden is further swathed with camouflage netting, an assortment of spectacles intended to facilitate sight is secreted at the back of a picture frame, a representation of a leafy shadow enigmatically appears on a reversed painting and any illusion of logical progression has been expunged from (deconstructed) sections of measuring tape.
Austin's work is deliberated, measured, calculated. However, in a reversal of this sublimation of emotion, possibly signified by the disruption of sequential measurement in his realigned tape measures, there emerges in the work of the last two years a growing viscerality, apparent in the accelerating profusion of nails, the strands of human hair, the advancing/creeping weeds. It is underscored by an emphasis on process, exemplified by the inclusion of the palette, the paintbrushes, the tools of the painter's trade. Significantly, Austin's ever-emblematic spectacles are now sequestered at the rear of the picture frame.
'Hairiness' observes Marina Warner, 'indicates animal nature: it is the distinctive sign of the wilderness and its inhabitants, and bears the freight of Judaeo-Christian ambivalence about the place of instinct and nature, fertility and sexuality.'3 In many cultures a source of magic power or mana, the potency of hair becomes intensified when it is removed from the head (Painting Fetish/Hair Palette) in the form of fetishistic hair tokens or memento mori.
With a deft and witty deployment of twists and inversions and trompe l'oeil effects, Austin says that he strives for a 'casual clarity' and a 'matter of fact realism.' The pristine and carefully positioned nails of Painting Fetish #2 (2003) make way in this latest body of work for a proliferation of nails which - like the marked and pitted easels - betray the ravages of time. Indicating a darker, more driven aspect to the life of an artist, the palette/object of Painting Fetish /Nail Palette (2004) has unequivocally become a bed of nails.
A quality of abandonment pervades these works, as the tendrils of ivy in Easel Fetish/Nature Morte begin to obscure the name of the artist, as well as the easel on which it is inscribed. Furthermore, a sense that the paraphernalia of the painter - the easel, brushes, stretchers and palette - may be assuming the fossil-like quality of a relic, a memento mori is reinforced by the work Peintre Mort, in which paintbrushes wrapped in rabbit fur - inevitably recalling Chardin - rest with a solemn and eloquent finality on an empty frame that allusively bristles with nails.
Wendy Walker, August 2004
Notes
Jasper Johns, quoted in Ann Hindry, 'Conversation with Jasper Johns,' Artstudio, Paris, 1989, no. 12, p.13
Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1996: p.111
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, London: Random House, 1995: p.359 |