‘I hate painting.’ Richard Lewer’s opening gambit at Adelaide Central School of Art’s (ACSA) Painting Symposium was the kind of healthy disavowal yet vulnerable admission that many painters share. It is a contradiction perhaps relevant to any artist chasing the train of media specificity in the twenty-first century. While Lewer’s sentiment is wry, spoken with the same humour and compelling lack of artifice present in his paintings, it is also a declaration: ‘I’m going to break this medium.’
Lewer was in conversation with curator Leigh Robb, a discussion that laid rich ground for an unfolding series of ‘speed-dating’ style presentations throughout the day. Ten South Australian painters, at varying career stages, offered a flying visit into their practices and processes. Dr Maria Kubik, Senior Paintings Conservator at ArtLab, also gave a presentation on best practices for contemporary painters. Hot tip: when freighting your work for exhibition, roll your paintings facing outward and, of course, wait until they are dry.
The symposium doubled as the launch of Artlink’s current issue Narrative + Painting. Staged at the Mercury Cinema in Adelaide to a near-full house of fellow painters, artists, academics, scouting curators, arts workers and arts writers, audience attendance spoke magnitudes. A subject people were willing to give over their Sunday afternoon to, painting is clearly alive: art history’s funerary dictates were not invited. Rather, there was a hunger for the medium, for the collective deep dive into working with and against a material when materiality and its potential has been seemingly exhausted.
Same goes for Narrative + Painting. As a contemporary art magazine that works hard to document the times, over the past four decades Artlink has witnessed the long tails of relational, conceptual and performance art; generative porosity between disciplines; ebbs and flows of capital and power; and contemporary art’s dalliances with tech, tourism and the wellness movement, among other enterprises. In the last decade particularly, Artlink has observed the de-materialisation of the art school, where studio disciplines have been disbanded for the now umbrella term ‘creative industries’. All of this led our team to painting. As the first issue in Artlink’s 44-year history exclusively dedicated to the medium, Narrative + Painting sates an appetite for this specific form of visual storytelling.
Naturally, the symposium’s findings were as varied as the artists. Max Callaghan offered a deep iconographic analysis of a single painting. Loren Orsillo traced the process of ideation — how one painting leads to the next. Lucia Dohrmann’s ‘thread paintings’, which involve meticulous aesthetic rules of play, reflect the games artists set up for themselves. Who wouldn’t set some rules, when theoretically speaking, just about anything constitutes art?
Daryl Austin’s mistrust of illusion—a compelling conundrum for a painter—dovetailed with Tara Rowhani-Farid’s reprisal of personal and collective memory. It was Rowhani-Farid’s cerise paper pulp paintings that most closely resembled endurance performance. Working against time, with changing rates of wetness and dryness (something most painters would relate to), one particularly ambitious painting took her ten days, working sixteen hours straight.
Christian Lock shared this muscular approach with his large-scale experimentations in surface control. Lock’s intuitive and counter-intuitive decision-making—acts that make and unmake a painting—recalled Lewer’s approach. In Lewer’s latest series, The stories that persist are not always true (at Hugo Michell Gallery until 10 May), painted on Laminex tabletops, a single work could take upwards of 200 layers — painted, rubbed back and built up again on an untenable, repellent surface. Lewer dryly blamed his earlier series on brass and steel for giving him two hernias. The physicality of painting cannot be understated; it’s a true test of the artist’s fitness.
While Lewer described painting as a ‘lonely sport’, the inverse is also true. Jimmy Dodd’s painting machines, which outsource authorship, constitute years of his evolving community projects: ‘audience is primary, painting is secondary’. Jasmine Crisp, an Adelaide muralist better-known beyond Adelaide, aired the joys of working in the public realm against the trials of cloistered, boardroom commissioning processes. Henry Jock Walker described how he oscillates between community participation and performativity, then retreats to studio production. Whereas Mary-Jean Richardson and Anna Gore—a mother-daughter duo—offered a steadier model of collaboration. In the studio, the pair work on each other’s paintings through intuitive, mutual aesthetic decisions. Authorship is not outsourced: it is almost entirely erased.
Sport is a useful segue for Michael Carney’s solo exhibition, STADIUMKRAFT. Curated by Andrew Purvis at Adelaide Central Gallery, STADIUMKRAFT is ACSA’s on-campus exhibition programmed to align with the symposium — before audience numbers blew out, prompting a change of venue. It seems painting enthusiasts could fill an arena.
Featuring empty track and field circuits, deserted tennis courts and pictorial planes fragmented by basketball court demarcations, Carney’s oil paintings emanate a droning pop art energy, like weathered billboards. As pop art emerged in the mid-1950s, British critic and curator Lawrence Alloway described it as living with the culture one has grown up with — a revolution in democratic image-making. Although Carney’s model-scale stadium of ceramics and curved Jumbotron digital projection say less about the democratisation of cultural signs (Carney’s paintings are too oblique to afford us a singular narrative direction), they do generate an aura of shared memory: pumping legs, talking trash, fast food on the sidelines. But Carney also dehumanises his scenes. They are eerie, vacant. Sporting prowess devolves into dilapidated, overgrown grottos and forested peripheries (which strike as distinctly un-Australian). The thrills and sorrows of winning and losing are hollowed out; ‘90s teenage listlessness has curdled with age.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of writing about Carney’s work when his focus was landscape painting. At the time, I had trouble pinpointing what his images were “doing”. What could the traditions of landscape painting possibly offer a city-bound studio painter working with AI and VR? I thought it was about the surfaces of nature, pure facade: in a virtual world, sunlight pools without heat. But STADIUMKRAFT offers a new insight. The algorithmic airlessness of Carney’s scenes; his ‘trawled’ and amalgamated landscapes that make us feel simultaneously here but there; the transformation of familiar signs into existential fodder; generic appears to be the aim of Carney’s game. It sounds like a bad word, but it isn’t. Generic is the pop artist’s playground.
STADIUMKRAFT dovetails with the findings of the symposium as Carney grapples with the relevance of anachronistic mediums like painting and ceramics today. What do artists gain from discipline specificity against a backdrop of AI ‘slop’ and copyright infringements? What can painting do in a world saturated by images, amid a new wave of synthetic images? It’s too soon to say, but in a nod to Lewer, it’s through breaking the medium and our ideas of what painting is, that we get closer to a truth. Even if it’s only provisional.