November/December 08
Aboriginal Dreaming
When I picked up the book Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World, written by the former chief art critic for The Australian, I rather relished an evening ahead of hard-hitting, excoriating opinion. Read More
Artbank: Celebrating 25 Years of Australian Art (SA) > SA
Artbank is the largest buyer of contemporary Australian art in the country. Read More
Borderlands: Phillip George (NSW) > NSW
Phillip George doesn’t pull his punches. He is an unapologetically political artist. Read More
Graduate Shows (VIC) > VIC
With the summer sun brooding on the horizon and the first few long balmy openings under the belt we are fast approaching that series of monster sun downers known on the official cultural calendars as the ‘grad shows’. Read More
Hans Heysen (SA) > SA
When I meet her for coffee the softly spoken Rebecca Andrews, Assistant Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, has just returned from a field trip to the Flinders Ranges with the South Australian Museum’s Waterhouse Club. Read More
Make it Good for the People: Darby Jampijinpa Ross (NT) > NT
Having spent much of his life creating highly detailed canvases, Indigenous Australian painter Darby Jampijinpa Ross was in his mid-nineties when, due to failing eyesight, he stopped painting for the first time in over 20 years. Read More
Point of View: Eugene Carchesio Explores the Collection (QLD) > QLD
With a career spanning more than 25 years, Brisbane artist Eugene Carchesio has established himself as one of Australia’s most fascinating and thought provoking contemporary artists. Read More
The Titled Stage: Mike Parr (TAS) > TAS
Detached, a new privately funded not-for-profit contemporary arts organisation, opens in Hobart this month and as its name suggests is an unknown quantity in the burgeoning Tasmanian contemporary art scene. Read More
Point of View: Eugene Carchesio Explores the Collection (QLD)
By Heidi Maier
With a career spanning more than 25 years, Brisbane artist Eugene Carchesio has established himself as one of Australia’s most fascinating and thought provoking contemporary artists. Gordon Craig, curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the QUT Art Museum, describes him as “a man who walks around collecting images with
his subconscious.”
With this in mind, Carchesio was a natural choice as someone to curate a show from the vast and diverse QUT collection. Every artist reveals something of themselves in their responses to the works of others,
and it is this, in large part, that makes the resulting exhibition, Point of View: Eugene Carchesio Explores the Collection, such a compelling show.
The QUT collection comprises some 2700 works and includes pieces by such revered artists as Charles Blackman, Louise Bourgeois, Hans Heysen, Mike Parr, Margaret Preston, Auguste Rodin, Grace Cossington Smith and Brett Whiteley.
Craig says Carchesio’s stint as a guest curator brings, “a fresh set of eyes in to look over what we have created, to contextualise it in a different manner to how the staff may consider such artworks and to see new connections between artworks and artists arise.”
It is hoped that the Point of View exhibition will become an annual or biennial event on the Museum’s exhibitions calendar, allowing people that have either a strong presence within the collection, or in the local art scene, to curate an exhibition without the limitations of a prescribed curatorial brief.
Carchesio is enthusiastic about the opportunity to select works and has an unconventional approach to curating the exhibition saying, “I can’t wait to get in there and ‘play’ with this stuff. It feels a bit like using artworks as a palette to construct a painting from.” At the time of writing, he had yet to finalise his choices for the show. As he explains, “I need to be in the space with the works and I want to experience a ‘live’ dialogue with the pieces. I hope to be surprised and delighted to see what happens when I finally place works together.”
If Carchesio the curator is difficult to pin down, Carchesio the artist is also hard to categorise. What he calls “an exploration of the interconnectedness of things” informs much of his work.
Katsushika Hokusai, Landscape (from ‘Manga III’),
1815, colour woodblock print. Gift of William ‘Monty’ Howard, 2007. QUT Art Collection.
Watercolour has always been an integral part of Carchesio’s artistic practice, so it makes sense that he has provisionally selected a number of watercolours from the collection. However, all of them are aesthetically different from his own pale, almost translucent, works. One of Carchesio’s own watercolour paintings, Flowers to Albert, pays homage to Albert Namatjira and he may exhibit Jillian Namatjira’s vibrant Petermann Ranges, Central Australia, as well as three other landscape inspired watercolours by Kenneth Macqueen.
Much of Carchesio’s own work over the years has been predominantly
conceptual, involving not only watercolours but intricately detailed miniature installations comprising matchboxes, small paper cones and myriad found objects such as pressed petals, used stamps, typewritten poems and fragments of cloth. His attraction, then, to Madonna Staunton’s very first collage work, an untitled piece that is made from torn strips of newsletters and magazines, is at once unsurprising and intriguing. One wonders if Carchesio sees something of himself in Staunton’s work, something of his own interest in the use of found materials and their recycling into works of art.
Carchesio has long been interested in various artistic movements: Modernism, Dada and Futurism among them. These disparate influences are apparent in the diversity of the works he has selected, with pieces running the gamut from Staunton’s collage to a confronting surrealist etching by Louise Bourgeois and the inherent quietude of more traditional woodblock prints by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.
There is an undeniable delicacy and detail in both Carchesio’s own work and something like Hokusai’s Landscape or Auguste Rodin’s drypoint print, Allegory of Spring, but it is also interesting to consider his interest in mathematical angles, geometric shapes and the use of bright, bold colours.
It was, Carchesio says, colour that drew him to Vincent Brown’s work Gaslight, a painting which uses a colour palette so bright that it verges on gaudy in its depiction of a horse drawn carriage. Colour, too, was part of the appeal of John Coburn’s Mosque, which is rendered in fiery red and orangey yellow hues, accented and highlighted by the use of a dark brown gouache. Another of Carchesio’s chosen works, Robert Klippel’s, Untitled, screenprint is similarly unashamedly vibrant, modern and graphic.Whether it is through his own works: delicate botanically inspired watercolours, intriguing miniature installation pieces, and bolder, geometric paintings, Point of View offers a number of ways in which to understand and interpret Eugene Carchesio’s distinctive practice and artistic influences through the artworks to which he finds himself simply, inexplicably drawn.
Robert Klippel, Untitled (from the ‘Red Millennium’ portfolio), 1999,
colour screeprint. Gift of Pat Corrigan AM under the Cultural
Gifts Program, 2001. QUT Art Collection.
See Carchesio’s own work in, Someone’s Universe: The Art of Eugene Carchesio QLD Art Gallery, 25 October to 1 February.
Heidi Maier is a Brisbane-based freelance writer and reviewer.
