Christian Lock: a new gesture by Maria Bilske & Michael Newall, 2003

The basic unit of painting, the brushstroke, has in itself accrued many meanings through the history of art. It has variously operated as evidence of the hand of the master, ("the masterstroke"), and an anti-classical gesture in its rough realness. It has mimicked atomic units of visual sensation (in Pointillism and Impressionism), or stood in for matter (in the way that the thick paint stands in for flesh in the work of Francis Bacon or Frank Auerbach for instance). It has been representative of expressionist meaning, embodying a mood or something of the painter's self, and operated as the abject, leaking smear that so readily elicits psychoanalytic readings of much contemporary art.

But while the brushstroke has borne all these meanings, decoration has not traditionally been a primary one. The brushstroke in oil painting particularly is too physical, too corporeal, too 'fat' and oily to have become a unit in a decorative scheme. The exceptions to this rule derive mostly from Roy Lichtenstein's famous painting of a brushstroke. That work, of course, was a play on the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke that denoted authorial presence. In Lichtenstein's painting the brushstroke became a graphic mark, effectively flattened out by his Pop depiction of it. In losing its corporeality, it acquired a decorative potential it did not have before.

Christian Lock pulls a similar trick, rehabilitating the brushstroke to play a part in a decorative economy. He too effectively flattens the brushstroke, but he does so in quite a different way. He fixes a real stroke of paint, as thick and demonstrative as any, between layers of resin, flattening it, and placing it against glistening, holographic surfaces, so that it speaks of movement and energy, unhindered by the matter and mass we traditionally associate with the paint of gestural abstraction.

The smoothing of the surface is in a way a homogenising gesture, a literal glossing over if not removal of the work's manual origins, creating flawlessly slick confections that, combined with the techno-quality of the holographic materials Lock uses, are suggestive of a kind of contemporary Warholian desire "to be a machine". This is furthered by the processes Lock uses. His systematic selection and conscious arrangement and layering of his painted gestures over his readymade backgrounds suggest the primacy of aesthetic considerations, a move towards the decorative, a contemporary beauty.

Unlike Lichtenstein though, Lock's movement into the decorative seems provisional; it is not a complete renunciation of older traditions. All the old meanings and uses of the brushstroke are still perceptible, lying as if cryogenically shelved in his layers of resin. More than self-justifying mark-making, Lock's sampling of the gesture preserves it as symbolic of all these histories, and these traces of meaning give the work an underlying strength and richness that seems antithetical to Lichtenstein's Pop. The ordered matrices of his work in particular are evocative of shimmering macrocosms, allusive of something beyond what we can see, like a window onto an otherwise invisible world of ideal form that underlies our own.

Finally, it should not be overlooked that formally Lock's works recall religious icons. Instead of painted saints against a ground of gold leaf, they place paint (the brushstroke) against reflective, iridescent backdrops. Lock's jammy impastos are trowelled over grounds that in their metallic lustre recall the gold leaf that symbolises a higher world. Of course, here it is not Paradise that is suggested, but the gleaming, sheer, almost weightless surfaces of modern manufacturing and technology. It is against this ground that Lock's strokes of paint undergo their transmutation into pure energy and movement, removed, if not irreparably divorced, from their corporeal origins.

Maria Bilske & Michael Newall, 2003

Christian Lock by Wendy Walker, 2007

'... I want to have film of a surfer right at that point moving along constantly right at the edge of the tube. That position is the metaphor of life to me, the highly conscious life. That you think of the tube as being the past, and I'm an evolutionary agent, and what I try to do is to be at that point where you're going into the future, but you have to keep in touch with the past ... there's where you get the power; ... and sure you're most helpless, but you also have most precise control at that moment.'1

Timothy Leary

In November 1886, a regional French newspaper reported the astonishment of several Breton fishermen, who had observed 'a man, dressed like them... stubbornly painting, during the storm, upon canvases fixed to an easel lashed to the rocks with ropes.'2 The artist was Claude Monet, who in 1886 undertook a journey to Belle-Ile-en-Mer – a remote island off the coast of Brittany – where he painted a series of seascapes of its dramatic rock formations and wild churning waters that are emblematic of eighteenth and nineteenth century notions of the sublime. In the historical discourse of the sublime, the sea – with its capacity to inspire awe and terror – figures prominently and for Schopenhauer, for example, other natural phenomena paled beside the sheer intensity of the oceanic sublime.

The Monet episode echoes the legendary (separate) exploits of Joseph Vernet and J.M.W. Turner, who were driven to experience a storm at sea, whilst lashed to the mast of a ship. Exposure to the power of nature is even more direct and intense intense – perilous, yet also potentially exhilarating – for the surfer. 'One of the great lessons that you learn in the ocean is that while you are totally insignificant to the total mass, you can survive in it by being part of it.'3

The subjective paintings of Christian Lock are predicated on a lifelong engagement with surfing and the associated paraphernalia of surf culture – surfboard production and surf art as well as comic books, films and surfing mythology. Two distinct strands – large acrylic works on canvas and the smaller surfboard paintings, in which expressive brushwork is contained within a sheath of clear, polished resin or (more lyrically) Lock's 'rolling waves of liquid glass'4 – have continued to evolve within his art practice. In utilising a variety of inventive techniques to 'push liquid around to create forms', Lock equates his visceral gestural markings with the swooping manoeuvres of the experienced surfer – referring to the surfboard as a 'brush.'

Like Lock's ongoing leitmotif of a seductive biomorphic (flower-like) form in One Sheet of Strawberry Fields, One Black Caravan, One Last Coffin Ride (2007), the black chrysalis-like, Surrealist-inspired motif of the large brooding, aubergine painting Out of Your Depth suggests the possibility of metamorphosis. These ambiguous hovering and mutable forms – also viewed by the artist as transitional spaces, as portals or thresholds (to transcendent experience) – reappear in more tranquil and cool (aqueous?) mode in George Greenough Versus Timothy Leary, wherein the introduction of fine brushwork accentuates a contrasting sense of the ethereal.

The impetus for the surfboard paintings came not only from Lock's observation of techniques associated with the production of resin surfboards – notably the globules of oleaginous, amber-like resin streaked with traces of paint to be found in drips and clumps on the floor of the glasser's bay – but also from a childhood preoccupation with marbles (habitually viewed in perpetual rolling motion). 'I could stare for hours at the twisting strokes of pigment caught in their interiors. It was like looking at a moment caught in time. A frozen gesture that might just reactivate and start back in motion if you kept staring for long enough.'

Adopting a strategy of sampling and remixing as a fluid means 'of developing aesthetic and conceptual frameworks' (a methodology familiar from the work of contemporary electronic musicians), Lock's luscious impasto brushstrokes on stark (unaltered), retina-dazzling holographic grounds – exhibited in 2003 at Greenaway Art Gallery – quoted from Lichtenstein's brushstroke works, such as Yellow Brushstoke I (1965). Devoid however of Lichtenstein's satirical intent and with characteristically charismatic titles such as Poison Apples for Longing Lovers or Too Good to Tango With the Poor Boys, they effectively represented a joyous valorisation of the gestural brushstroke.

For Lock these optically assertive paintings also indicated a satisfying synthesis or hybrid of the organic gesture, a digitalised electronic version of the modernist grid and a smooth flawlessness of surface – a straddling therefore (rather than a collision) of organicist and mechanicist modes of abstraction. Although it must be noted that the holographic grids – electrifying in their brilliant, ever-fluctuating hues – did appear to hover on the precipice of chaos. The holographic material is also of course, a readymade and in his 2003 Mellon series of lectures, Kirk Varnedoe noted the significance of such unexpected hybrids – of the blending of 'strains from seemingly opposite camps' – in the forging of 'important new artistic languages.'5

Frequently deployed as a polemical device, the colour black (in particular the black monochrome6) possesses a subversive art historical resonance. Ad Reinhardt's signature black paintings (1953-1967) can be viewed for example, as the valediction or endpoint of a certain kind of reductive abstraction. Interestingly a monochromal black page (signifying the death of a character) was inserted by Laurence Sterne into his picaresque eighteenth-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. But an even earlier precedent of a black square (depicting the prima materia, the beginning of all creation) exists in the first volume of Robert Fludd's early seventeenth-century treatise The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of the two worlds, namely the greater and the lesser.7

With dramatic, theatrical effect, Lock painstakingly shrouds his dazzling, light-reactive holographic grounds with multiple tinted layers of resin in black paintings that – in a distinctively Australian twist – resemble the chameleon brilliance of black opals. Lock's unique black paintings may therefore be fugitive, but they are also unforgettable.

Wendy Walker, June 2007

Endnotes

1. Timothy Leary, 'The Evolutionary Surfer', interview with Steve Pezman, SURFER, Jan. 1978
2. Steven Levine, 'Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet and the Oceanic Feeling', New Literary History, 1985, p. 380
3. Steve Pezman, 'The Evolutionary Surfer', SURFER, Jan. 1978
4. All Christian Lock quotes (henceforth unnumbered) are from 2007 interviews with Wendy Walker
5. Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Uni Press, 2003, p. 7. Varnedoe is referring to the (historical) overlapping and blending of strains from the seemingly opposite camps of Johns and Pollock, or Picasso and Duchamp.
6. For Anthony Haden-Guest the monochrome painting was 'the great Modernist icon of the sublime, involving Burke's privations in the fact that all detail and differentiation has disappeared from the world of vision.' Lock proposes a contemporary 'fictitious model of the techno-sublime that incorporates the gesture.'
Anthony Haden-Guest in Sticky Sublime, Bill Beckley (ed), NY, Allworth Press, 2001, p. 72
7. Cited in Gabriel Ramin Schor, 'Black Moods', the Latin title is Utriusque cosmi, maioris scilicet et minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica historia http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue7/blackmoods.htm