Singular Pleasures 1

This is the first of a series of columns I ran in one of subsections of The Age in the late 90s.

Solveig Polk, The Scream of the Marmot; Byron Yapp, Shrillness, both at Rectoscope Galleries, Fitzroy.
Torquil Sprague, Recent Paintings; Leicester-Farglow 2, Malvern.

In The Scream of the Marmot at Rectoscope Galleries, Solveig Polk throws down a clear challenge. This installation, featuring a small fur-covered cube as a narrative anchor, taunts the viewer with situations that are as abrupt as they are hirsute. Representing a thematic elaboration of the polemic stated in Choice/Condiments (1995), perceptions of the discourse between person and place are interrogated further, mediated through (and indeed by) a series of open cubicles. While functioning as both matrix and context for the fur cubes, their patina of gestural incisions suggests telephone boxes. If the notion of time rendered as electrical impulses, is being addressed here, I would have expected it to be executed with more fluency by an artist of this calibre. Each partition encloses what is ultimately an institutional space, broadly hinted at by the presence in one of a defaced health insurance company brochure. The catalogue essay appropriates far too heavily from Victoria Kettering's over-familiar Barthe's Espadrilles and Hegel's Despair, adding to the redoubling echoes of time wasted.

Shrillness, also at Rectoscope, is an altogether different premise. Byron Yapp engineers a triumph of the dynamic over the moribund, combining soot-stained industrial artefacts with muted cibachrome reproductions of Flemish genre paintings. The dominance of functional and obdurate diagonals over the bland rotundity of the reproduced images can be read as a sly aside at the expense of their implicit bourgeois morality. Yapp's sense of playfulness, as in last year's Cheese and Briquettes, always runs the risk of straying into gaucheness. Here, though, there is only one questionable instance: the inclusion of a bread roll bearing David Hockney's signature in a jar of formaldehyde is simply unnecessary. Preserved autographed bread products notwithstanding, this exhibition is a bold manifestation of Yapp's burgeoning aptitude for positing essential questions of meaning in a voice that remains on the right side of stridency.


Across town at at Leicester-Farglow 2, one of the sorriest spectacles of the Art year to date clings to the walls as though recoiling from embarrassment. It cannot be disputed that several-time Wynn and Sulman Prize winner Torquil Sprague has acquired a mastery of painterly technique in his long career. Compositionally, he can scarely be faulted, and his subtle rendering of the interplay of transient light and natural form is seldom bettered. Nevertheless, this collection of recent works displays something bordering on contempt. It appears that the informed observer is meant to do nothing more than train the apparatus of perception on a mute gaggle of ostensibly impressive and well painted landscapes.... and that is precisely the trouble. It is all so much paint, devoid of polemic, discourse, leitmotif, subtext, schadenfreude, iconographic anaptyxis and even the most rudimentary metaphor. There is nothing beneath these surfaces apart from canvas and priming, and of course the preliminary drawings, executed no doubt with Sprague's refined draftsmanship. When we dissect their intent, we register only the inherently disspiriting information that someone has observed the natural world and translated that experience into paint. They steadfastly resist deconstruction, which leads me to suspect that Sprague is saying merely "Look, I've painted some rocks, trees and skies". Can there be a more empty assertion in modern art praxis? To think that only last month, the same space hosted the awe-inspiring fibrous tension of Bronwyn Katsambakis's Meditation for a Bag of Flour and 400 Teledexes and the pungent foam rubber spirals of her Marjory has an Operation. These two works displayed an abundance of all that Sprague fails to divulge in 20 major canvases. What a great pity. 

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