Todd Hunter
dal 15/4/2008 al 9/5/2008
Segnalato da
15/4/2008
Todd Hunter
Scott Livesey gallery, Melbourne
This perfect day. There is simultaneously a gentle lyricism and a violent cacophony occurring in these paintings, as though he is capturing the shifting seasons, the movement of light, the pulse of the breeze through some system of time-lapse capture.
Todd Hunter is an alchemist of form. Neither strictly speaking figuration or abstraction, he has taken the colours and shapes of the natural world and put them through the blender of his fecund imagination. In many ways it is a ruse – we ‘see’ a ‘landscape’ even though he denies us the literal rendering of tree and sky, rock and shrub. But they are clearly, vividly there. He evokes the ‘essence’ of a landscape without resorting to the banalities of the literal.
This is not because Todd Hunter can’t paint. Indeed, he is a truly masterful draughtsman. But he has evolved beyond the need to take us by the hand. He’s happy to throw us into the maelstrom of the essence of nature. He has done this before with the human figure. When he paints a female nude he eschews the form and goes to the heart of his subject.
There is simultaneously a gentle lyricism and a violent cacophony occurring in these paintings, as though he is capturing the shifting seasons, the movement of light, the pulse of the breeze through some system of time-lapse capture. The paint is applied with an energy that reflects the winds, the tides and the power of light, swirling us into his almost hallucinogenic world.
Hunter’s love for music is abundantly clear in these epic canvases. He has cited the band The Dirty Three as amongst his inspirations. Anyone who has seen or heard that strange triumvirate of musicians will immediately recognise the same pulsations and gradations that they achieve. Essentially headed by the violinist Warren Ellis, the bands’ music is a barely controlled blend of classical, folk and rock elements that borders on the cacophonous. The music leaps and shifts like a Dervish on acid and one can almost imagine Hunter, with palette-knife or brush, swirling around the studio. Like the music he adores, there are moments of quite, almost timeless, contemplation in these paintings. We can feel the long moments of quietly looking at the hills and gullies, the rocks and clouds, before the wind picks up and the colours are scattered into roaring new life and he captures This Perfect Day.
- Ashley Crawford
Scott Livesey gallery
909A High Street, Armadale - Melbourne