GRAVITY SYSTEM RESPONSE

BLACKARTPROJECTS & ASH KEATING PRESENT

GRAVITY SYSTEM RESPONSE B L A C K

GRAVITY SYSTEM RESPONSE Meat Market 5 Blackwood Street North Melbourne, Australia 6 - 13 April, 2017

GRAVITY SYSTEM RESPONSE Within a climate of mimesis and simulacra, where an image can be produced and disseminated faster than ever before, a certain spiritless mask has begun to accompany such pictures. Even in 1985, American art historian Rosalind Krauss spoke of the copy as ‘a view of the bees in the hive rather than the taste of the honey.

In this sense it is the term of demystification’— in other words, the image was there but the feeling was not.i And, indeed, painterly figuration has increasingly come under attack as vapid imitation.

We can trace this attack back to the modernist critique of figurative painting as illusionistic. But it is this history compounded by the rise of digital imagery that has seen us enter a postrepresentational phase of artistic creation where a sense of emotional affect has steadily risen in symbolic value.

Cue Ash Keating’s Gravity System Response — a series of landscape paintings that act as loose and poetic compositions rather than facsimiles. These works refuse the copy. Instead they evoke the mystique that Krauss believes the copy to have discarded: they conjure feeling rather than material substance. Keating’s are ghostly abstractions of countless, vivid layers bleeding into one another on canvases of great proportions: the largest measure

350 x 200 centimetres. In creating retroactively from memory, Keating mines the space between reception and creation, where a percolation of the subjective psyche takes place. Indeed, phenomenological affect — the body’s immediate response to an object — is key to representing the residual feeling of things seen and experienced.

Keating spent a number of months creating this body of works specifically for the site of the North Melbourne Meat Market.

From Gravity System Response’s inception, Keating remained acutely adamant that the exhibition should be theatrical, dark and allencompassing. He has subsequently collaborated with lighting designer Matthew Adey to produce a tightfocused lighting technique that persuades the viewer to quietly engage with the paintings as though they were in sites of worship: albeit a non-denominational site of worship. This exhibition keeps with Keating’s grandeur that he has explored in the past with his outdoor murals: however, now the effect has shifted from the spectacle to the meditative.

If Keating’s chosen outcome was concrete from day one, then his method for getting to this end point was certainly less defined.

But this lack of certainty is also central to the reading of these works. Because, for Keating,

achieving the desired emotional conclusion in this series comprised of repeated trials and errors that were based on intuition rather than a defined temporal end point.

What he was looking for was an indefinable, consummate effect where colour and layer would combine in perfect unison: at minimum it was a refusal of the copy à la Krauss, at maximum it was a desire for the sublime.

He began by mixing endless combinations of paints to create shades that would elicit particular emotive responses. Indeed, basic colour theory, which has been in practice for centuries, dictates that certain combinations result in varying visual effects. As an extension of this theory, Keating relied upon the emotive value of these visual effects as a very important determining factor of his palette. In the Meat Market, we encounter the outcome of this mediation on colour: a central tetraptych of yellow, orange and magenta is alive with buzzing energy, while a triptych of lilac and cobalt that elicits calm and stillness, and another triptych of yellow ochre and red that is earthy and soothing.

Using an airless sprayer, Keating then layered these paints onto his canvas, using his intuition as barometer for the direction of the composition. Starting with lighter

colours, Keating would build up the layers, intermittently spraying the wet strata with water to allow earlier ones to show through.

Keating could not predict how long each set of paintings would take to complete: one triptych took just one week, whereas another other took close to a month. Although he was using essentially the same technique every time, certain elements out of his control — such as the length of a drip or the opacity of a certain hue when applied to the canvas — rendered the process also one of exploring the limits of control.

Indeed, the deployment of such simple repetition is a powerful tool for revealing how variation effects the viewer on a physical and, subsequently, emotional level.

In addition to the use of the same technique throughout each series in the exhibition, Keating has attempted to replicate the abstract composition of the larger canvases in the form of smaller canvases of 180 x 120 centimetres and 120 x 90 centimetres. The viewer’s response to a simple shift in scale is significant, particularly because we are first given the smaller canvases before entering through a black curtain to the main space where the larger canvases are hung. The atmosphere created by the artwork is based upon the human scale as yardstick: the small and medium canvases provide intimacy and

comfort, while the largest canvases in the main section of the Meat Market are monumental, towering over the body of their viewer.

Ultimately, landscape has been essentialised as memory and emotion. In Keating’s purple and blue triptych, one section of the large canvas appears to illustrate the view of the land from the air, but this reading is fluid: others might see a ghostly figure, or sands moved about by wind. Elsewhere, abstracted suggestions of rocks hollowed out by water could just as easily be silhouettes of mountain ranges. As such, the artist’s use of intuition to achieve his final compositions is a poetic translation of lived experience that is malleable, and that is capable of being paraphrased countless times to the experience of his audience. To copy that seen in nature goes only so far to express the inner working of the psyche. Keating understands this concept and, for Gravity System Response, has reacted to our image-saturated climate with grand abstractions of spirit and desire.

Amelia Winata, April 2017

i Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1985, pp. 126

Gravity System Response #28 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 4 panels, each 350 x 200 cm

Gravity System Response #42 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 180 x 120 cm

Gravity System Response #39 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 3 panels, each 350 x 200 cm

Gravity System Response #50 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 180 x 120 cm

Gravity System Response #48 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 3 panels, each 350 x 200 cm

Gravity System Response #33 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 90 cm

Gravity System Response #44 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 90 cm

Gravity System Response #55 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 90 cm

Gravity System Response #43 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 90 cm

Gravity System Response #32 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 90 cm

Gravity System Response #52 (2017) synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 90 cm

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