Stories in paintings and paintings about stories
Once upon a time I tried to speak of the work of Ben Quilty as “post-critical”. Yes, all the way back in 2008, I was wanting to think his practice, and figurative painting more generally, as somehow outside of its “readability”, its “reduction” to a series of mostly predetermined issues. In fact, more than that—admittedly, a bit hyperbolically—I even wanted to suggest that his painting was what it was of, that it didn’t have any meaning outside of itself.
