A two person exhibition of Paris-based Australian artist Anthony White and London-based Australian artist Martin Brown opens today at Le Pave D’Orsay, Paris. Both artists explore a contemporary interpretation of art making through their own individual explorations within the processes inherent in painting. Having originated from an outsider’s perspective of place or more accurately a displacement. There is a fundamental search at the heart of both their art practice navigating their relationship to European heritage.
As Australians, both artists look through a lens of a Western European colonial background, examine a shared historical and cultural point of departure, re-examine painting through a contemporary “re-exploration” of the varied historical modes within the broader painting tradition. To approach painting from a perspective of being “unencumbered” from the weight of the European tradition. It’s from this perspective where you could argue there is a new purpose of being able “to learn to paint again”
To discover a new language from the old, through depiction and exploration of place, having re-examined pictorial space and painted surface.
It is also not necessarily a question of nationality, but perhaps a contemporary condition. The result of living in an international world, we are all now interconnected within a global context. The contemporary condition is to be relocated, either physically or mentally, and then somehow to attempt a personal reconciliation of identity within this paradigm.
However even though the work is concerned with a relationship to a past it is not by any means something that can be described as traditional, it is not attempting to recover techniques from the past but more looking at process and interpretation to then explore one’s
own aesthetic vision. The focus is on the pictorial problems that were being solved, not necessarily the answers that were given. The great works of the past were always concerned with a primary intent, not a secondary use of previous solutions that may bear no relationship to the pictorial problems that may have needed to be solved.
The importance of landscape painting, whether it be implied or described directly, it is a concern that is at the heart of Australian painting. There is an attempt to understand the “new world” in Australian painting that uses landscape, it is the attempt of the depiction of the unfamiliar, an attempt to understand where one is.
Both of these artists being Australian, placed within Europe, approach history as outsiders «displaced», unencumbered by the weight of tradition, and explore the genre of landscape and abstraction to approach one’s own meaning in a new place. Resulting in different varied aesthetic approaches with varied outcomes.
Anthony White and Martin Brown – Displacement
LE PAVE d’Orsay 48 rue des Lille, 75007 Paris lepavedorsay.wordpress.com
VERNISSAGE 13th October 2016 from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
EXHIBITION DATES
Thursday 13th to 25th of October 2016 12h – 18h except for Wednesdays and Sundays
www.martinbrownartist.com http://www.anthonyjwhite.net