MediumOil: The Inner and The Outer

About

“For the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without”. C.G. Jung

The process of painting and drawing is a subjective encounter between inner and outer worlds. Hence the paradox of painting that a decorative surface is able to act as mode of communication. Every mark on the surface faces outwards to the world and inwards to the artist’s mind.

Is there a point where something seen transforms into and coincides with something imagined? Where inner and outer worlds fuse?

Co-curators: Trevor Burgess and Marguerite Horner

Artist: Trevor Burgess, Caroline Burraway, Nelson Diplexcito, Oli Epp, Marguerite Horner, John Kiki, Lee Maelzer, Mona Osman

Finissage: Meet the Artist, Saturday 7th July, 12-3 pm

Marguerite Horner writes of “the external world as a trigger or metaphor for experiences.” The paintings may depict suburban or urban houses, cars, freeways yet these are a gateway to subjective experiences that may evoke transience, intimacy, loss and hope.

For Nelson Diplexcito there is a starting point in the direct encounter with images of various kinds, whose resonance is found in the development of the work through a process of what might called a search for painterly analogy. It is only through persistence in a process of detours and revisions that the work, as he says, “begins to look back at you”.

Lee Maelzer has made her own the overlooked, overgrown, neglected, decaying crannies of our 21st-century environment – whether experienced and photographed by her directly or constructed through the dystopian mixed media collages she makes as source images. It is through the finely judged tonal and chromatic intensity of the realization in paint that these places transform into a state of mind that you enter and inhabit.

For Trevor Burgess, the paintings start with his visual experience of everyday public spaces captured in snapshot photos. He says it is important that the paintings have a starting point in something he has seen and experienced, but there is always a gap between the appearance and the experience, which painting makes explicit.

Caroline Burraway’s relationship to her photographic source material is more direct. Her process of charcoal drawing intensifies the impact of the image – portraits that seek to restore power to people who have suffered, often in a historical and political context. In this case, the artist directs the creative process outwards inviting empathy with the subject.

But painters can equally come at painting from within their imaginations. Mona Osman starts with the populous contents of her inner world which teem over the canvas. Her personal experiences take a visible form that give them a narrative and pictorial logic.

John Kiki’s process of making figure paintings is an endless tirelessly inventive play with the creative potential of his medium, where inner and outer worlds vividly replenish each other.

Oli Epp‘s paintings are informed by everyday experiences and observations. They are autobiographical; sometimes confessional, sometimes irreverent and frequently handled with a humorous sense of pathos. His work focuses on situations that involve himself, or others that he has witnessed, in public and private moments that pass by as unremarkable, at a glance. But documenting these unreported tragedies in paint is, for him, an act of discovery.

THE INNER AND THE OUTER exhibition is part of MEDIUMOIL, a summer season dedicated to the art of painting