Tom Gerrard – Consequence: Recent Paintings
13 April – 1 May 2021, Metro Gallery, Armadale, Melbourne
Tom Gerrard’s exhibition, ‘Consequence: Recent paintings’, explores the way in which apparent scenes and objects of everyday life and anonymous, yet relaxed, characters going about their lives, reminds us the passage of time is inevitable. Behind these creations dealing with the mundane, Gerrard invites us to ponder over the spiritual dimensions that domestic objects and individuals’ most immediate surroundings conceal. At their core, Gerrard’s pictorial works, however, exude existentialist symbolism.
Gerrard articulates these rather sombre concerns in a pictorial vocabulary that is deceptively engaging, jovial and laissez-faire. While the irreverence and subversiveness of Pop Art and Street Art are the artist’s chief sources of inspiration, his practice also amalgamates them with other postmodernist influences, such as Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism as is eloquently demonstrated in the first part to this body of work. Indeed, this entails a creative process that any splatter, stain, spray, or residue of paint are pictorial embryos or composted matter that ultimately transform themselves into newer creations. As the artist has succinctly put it: ‘These paintings are test markings from other paintings and their colours and compositions are a consequence of these other paintings’.
Gerrard’s approach to his practice is that of a continued engagement with the creative process. While this may even more so be visible in the way in which line minimally defines represented figures and objects, forms contain a rich palette that have both functional and expressive purposes. His rich chromatic tapestry is far from being just a delightful harmony of contrasting hues to obey aesthetic tenets and delight viewers with its decorative effect. Rather, the ubiquity of blacks and whites at times constrain the artist’s rich palette – i.e., greys, blues, oranges, yellows, reds, pastel ochres. This pictorial tension was also present in Matisse’s works particularly from late 1900s to 1910s. In a similar way to the French master’s arrangement of colours, Gerrard constructs planes by juxtaposition of contrasting hues. The interplay of black and whites, which respectively symbolise light and darkness, underpins an abstraction process and thus resulting in a spatial tension of two-dimension and three-dimension planes.
It is telling that Gerrard’s familiarity with linear perspective and foreshortening to create space, as is evident from his depictions of doors, windows, individuals, and scenes within scenes or paintings within paintings, predicates his pictorial flirts with more classical conventions without utterly abandoning his muralist and street-art origins. This creative approach adds theatricality to his scenes as well as complexity to their visual narrative. Gerrard’s usage of the spatial devices probably proclaims art’s for art’s sake while elevating it to a higher status. He too pays homage to artist’s own creativity and thus its ‘consequence’ is that is worthwhile hanging the painting on a prominent wall in the lounge room. Here, Gerrard represents an individual – whose identity remains anonymous – placidly reads the paper as is shown in the painting ‘Sunday, 11am’. However, this meta-narrative is significant, yet intriguing, as a partly bald male figure – often shown sporting moustache or sunglasses and recognised by those familiar with the artist’s creations – may be the artist’s own alter ego. His presence is ubiquitous; namely, surrounded by or depicted on domestic objects, and at the back of the paper, a male figure appears similar to that depicted in the painting hanging in the wall. This pictorial recourse of including painting within a painting, for example, takes us back to such masters as Diego Velázquez’s creation of 1657, The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne (Prado National Museum, Madrid), yet with the stylistic legacy of such modernist traits as found in Cubism’s collage and Pop-Art and Street Art, to cite a few. For this reason (and many others that are not to be described here due to space constraints), Gerrard’s creations present postmodernist visual cannons not to frown upon.
In the wake of strict lockdown and social restrictions undergone by Melbournians during 2020 winter, the artist’s creations for this exhibition also, stress the ordinary liberates imagination thus making it an inspiration’s source that transcends its physical aspects and in turn making it sacred. This also reminds viewers to question futile endeavours of an increasing individualism, secularisation, and narcissism in the parameters of such a globalised society and social-media dominated culture. Art, conceived as a panacea of society’s maladies and its civilians’ ineptitudes, is for Gerrard, accustomed to the self-imposed isolation as arts’ muses dictate, an exercise of self-questioning as well as an interrogation to viewers to think over what causes us apprehension. Art is also a reminder to interrogate one’s fate within our innermost surroundings that are not only immediate but also intimate and most importantly safe.
Domi Córdoba
+61 (0) 423 305 696