Every artwork in this exhibition will destabilize your perspective. You will be asked not only to stare back at the abyss of an eclipse but to peer down from space at Earth via the mechanical gaze of a satellite. Your brain will make a gorgeous abstract pattern out of horror the smoke from the Black Summer bushfires spiralling into the sheer, flat blackness of outer space in ways that please the eye but trouble the soul Satellite comes from the root attendant, servant. These all seeing machines are under our command but still manage to look at our planet with inhuman indifference Elsewhere, you will be taken above the clouds, which were once thought by some to be made of rock not so different to the moon. The moon and the clouds, hanging right above us, so close and yet so foreign, gave us the original perspective on ourselves as Earth bound. No wonder Giles returns to them often in his work. He has been working this rich outer space seam for years, each time coming up with new responses to the challenges posed by art and life He told me he will always be drawn to all that is off Earth in his work. It lets him resolve the tension between realism and abstraction that hovers always at the painter’s shoulder. An image made of the Earth from space, or an eclipse, is both hyper real and unreal: it can seem impossible that planets and moons and suns exist at all, let alone that they can overlap and send a wave of shadow the totality hurtling towards us, signifying what
Giles Alexander CreationMythsand Other Tall Tales moonTallTalesandOtherCreationMythsOlsenGalleryandAnnexe,AugustSeptember2022.WhenIfirstvisitedthestudiowhereGilesworks,bycoincidenceI’dbeenreadingonthetrainthenaturewriterAnnieDillard’sdescriptionofenteringtheshadowoftotalitydarknesscausedbyatotaleclipseofthesun.IarrivedstillunsettledbyDillard’seeriewords,andthereonthewallofGiles’sstudioIencounteredasolareclipse.Theskysnappedoverthesunlikealenscover,Dillardwrites.Thehatchinthebrainslammed.Theholewherethesunbelongsisverysmall.Athinringoflightmarkeditsplace.Therewasnosound.Theeyesdried,thearteriesdrained,thelungshushed.Therewasnoworld.Therearelegendsofpeopledyinginfrightonseeingatotalsolareclipse.DillardsayspeoplescreamedaroundherthatshemayherselfevenhavescreamedwhentheblackbodyofthedetachedfromtheskyandrolledoverthesunGilestoldmelaterthatmorningthatweliveinabrieftemporalwindowwithspecialportentinthehistoryofoursolarsystem:itjustsohappensthatthemoonappearstoustobethesamesizeasthesun.ThetwocirculardisksweseefromEarthcansometimescanceleachotherout,slideovereachotherintoperfectlymatchedoblivion.Thisfactisbothstupendouswithmeaningandalsomeaninglessnothingbutatrickof
space and time It will not last forever, this Eclipseillusion.comes from the root failing to appear, leaving Being left behind by the moon or the sun is Earth’s great terror.
Giles’s paternal grandfather was a fighter pilot in World War II (as all of the first astronauts were too, those men who went into space as humans and returned as gods). He was shot down from the air in a training exercise when Giles’s father was still a baby. When Giles was a child, his dad taught him to build model planes and airbrush them. It was with his dad that Giles later learned to look at art, standing side by side in galleries contemplating the work by Old Masters.
There is a deeply personal through line here, one that becomes clear when these artworks whether off Earth or of Earth are put into conversation with one another, as is the magic of a body of work shown together. Soaring and falling, looking and feeling, distance and intimacy. “When you get up close to my photorealist works of Earth from space, of the eclipses, the clouds,” Giles said to me, “they fall apart.” The mark making transforms them back into human artefacts: imperfect and suffused with wistfulness and longing. Mastery is not the point, no matter how masterful his work may be. His Old Masters blurred into airbrushed fuzzy beauty are another way Giles is playfully wondering on the paper about the ways in which our minds are trained to make sense of images and by framing them twice, in the painting and again on the wall, he puts us into the sensory position of the museum goer, standing before these masterpieces like so many who have come before. When doesour vision blur in real life? In dreams, where we try to see clearly and cannot. As we age and accept our mortal fate When we are too far away from something (or someone) and cannot behold them in sharp focus no matter how much we long to feast our gaze on them And when our eyes fill with tears.
Dillard describes as the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. We toggle between faith and disbelief.
Think of the child airbrushing model planes with his father, the same father who will teach him how to look at art, whose own father fell from the sky from a great height. We look up at the sky not only in wonder; we look up too in times of despair, imagining that in the pure vacuum of space we might find relief from our longing for things we both know how to name and can never properly name. But as Dillard writes, before the solar eclipse was even fully over, everybody who’d been watching with her on the hill turned away and hurried back to their cars, back to their normal lives:
bouncefromtheitselfOneturnsatlastevenfromglorywithasighofrelief.Fromdepthsofmystery,andeventheheightsofsplendor,webackandhurryforthelatitudesofhome.
That’s what seeing the blurred Old Masters felt like to me: heading for the latitudesofhome. They ground us, keep our feet on the ground. All of Giles’s work, taken together, is a collective witnessing, inviting us as viewers to change perspective to catch glimpses of the whole mystery but also to remain attuned to the emotional ties that always tether us to Earth. He takes us all the way out there, but makes sure to bring us down from the otherworldly heights and back into the realm of human CeridwenfeelingDovey, fiction writer & Juneessayist.2022
Giles Alexander My Own End Times, 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 107 x 79 cm Framed#32861unframed$9,400 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander How did I get so lucky? 2000, 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 79 x 107 cm Framed#32868unframed$9,400 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander Just carry yourself back to me unspoilt from across that lonesome ocean , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 55 x 76 cm Framed#32869unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander Frozen out on the 20th floor, NYC 1997 , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 55 x 76 cm Framed#32865unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander I toasted the live-feed of his casket, 2020 , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 55 x 76 cm Framed#32864unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander Restless night on a Parisian railway siding, 1986 , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 55 x 76 cm Framed#32866unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander Lately I've been thinking about our son getting old - all of the bullshit he might be told , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 55 x 76 cm Framed#32862unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander The Rising Damp's Sunday night blues, 1983 , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 55 x 76 cm Framed#32867unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander You did cross my mind, but it didn't change , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 76 x 55 cm Framed#32871unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander After years of talk, the best man never called , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 76 x 55 cm Framed#32870unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander When you give an inch but they take a mile , 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 76 x 55 cm Framed#32863unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander Palette painting #2, 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 76 x 55 cm Framed#32908unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Giles Alexander Palette painting #1, 2022 acrylic on 300 gsm cotton rag 76 x 55 cm Framed#32909unframed$4,700 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
