HUMAN FORMATIONS
Joe Frost
front cover: Impasse, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 152 x 198cm
Joe Frost
HUMAN FORMATIONS
June 28 - July 16, 2016 109 Riley StReet, eaSt Sydney, nSW 2010 Opening Wednesday June 29, 6 - 8pm ABN 95 002 042 579
WATTERS GALLERY
109 Riley Street East Sydney 2010
Seeing Human Formations By Laura Fisher
Joe Frost has often said to me that he strives for simplicity. This is a characteristically enigmatic statement from an artist whose paintings so obviously manifest complexity. It conveys something of his aversion to conceptualism and grandiosity in art, to facile avant-gardism, as those familiar with Frost’s writings would know. Setting that aside, I think what he means is that the environments we inhabit have such density of meaning that a form of reductionism is required to offer convincing impressions of them. In this sense Frost practices a form of painting that echoes the selectivity of our habits of perception. From one moment to the next we narrow and widen our field of view, recognising and eliminating features of our world depending on their pertinence to our tasks. This selectivity is of course not only a matter of optical behaviour, but of emotional associations, both in our immediate social sphere and in the universe of strangers who we choose or choose not to admit into our personal trove of kindred humanity. In my mind, the best kind of painting presents itself as sensual testimony of an artist’s thoughtful and insightful practice of observation. Such paintings bring our habits of selective perception to consciousness, and provide a spur to reorient those
Figures under a tree, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 240cm
habits. The most affecting, uncanny paintings are those where an improbable collection of visual cues coalesce to form something that feels utterly familiar and authentic. What the modern tradition of painting reveals is that the possibilities for crafting this unlikely verisimilitude are inexhaustible. Lucky for us. Joe Frost draws these cues from everywhere. He includes things that are both visible and invisible to the eye: from the most prosaic objects of domestic life to the wake created by a person’s movement through space, from the artificial lights that punctuate our urban experience to the emotional force fields of an argument. People familiar with Frost’s work will recognise that he is as interested in depicting the structural forms of cranes and skyscrapers as he is in
adumbrating the hidden strata of three dimensional space. While he has become more preoccupied with representing the human figure in recent years, his figures are as architectural and permeable as any other structure.
Untitled, 2012, mixed media collage, 47 x 82cm
In previous years when he painted Sydney’s harbour, industrial sites and other city views Frost did not really consider himself to be a landscape painter, and recent forays into abstraction, like the collage Untitled (2012), have nothing to do with being an abstract painter per se but rather arise from his will to probe the porosity of the tableaux before him. Thus there is continuity between a work like Vacant Dock, Millers Point (2006), in which blockish forms are represented as motile surfaces lit from within and without, and the more recent painting Figures under a tree (2012). This is a lyrical work in which a man reads aloud while his girlfriend reclines deeply into the outdoor bench, soothed by the sun. But I feel she could just as easily be being serenaded before a piano, her companion playing banjo with his crossed leg swinging in time. Frost’s freeform approach to composition has provided him with planes and by-roads upon which to conduct diverse poetic investigations in recent years, penetrating the holy and the unholy, the opaque and the solid, and what is obscured from view. Thus in Let’s go Shopping (2014), overleaf, we can hardly distinguish the physical features of the three figures from the shimmering generica displayed in the window behind them. The effect is an impression of cheery entrapment within the sterile, seductive habitat of the shopping mall. In Miss Universe (2011) we find a woman compressed and malleated by the space around her, as if under duress. There is only the hint of a hand on hip and a bended knee to suggest the classic gesture of a beautiful body on show.
Vacant dock, Millers Point, 2006, acrylic on board, 120 x 130cm
As the title Human Formations suggests, the current series reflects Frost’s interest in the way the spaces we inhabit create odd languages for our bodies to speak. For those who take the time to look, the city creates readymade scenography within which we cluster together and conduct ourselves in strange ways: the still-but-moving human display of the escalator, the reciprocal voyeurism of the clotted urban beach, the synchronised and sweaty rituals that can be witnessed at the early morning boot camp in the public park. At times we sense that Frost is watching on with bemusement, but there are also strong currents of malcontent. We find this when he directs his attention to the social spaces of the
institution, in which our bodies absorb, deflect and sometimes wilt before the inscrutable energies that radiate from hierarchies of power and managerial relations. In the work Impasse (2016) we find a thin, mute figure in an oppressive office scenario. The judgemental, overbearing figure in the centre leans so far forward that their head is clipped off by the composition, surely about to lose balance (wouldn’t that be satisfying). Meanwhile the victim grips hard with pink fists and pushes back, willing their levitation from a demeaning scene. In On the committee (2016) all heads turn dutifully to the figure at the left. The bodies of those seated at the table seem to be of the same material, bonded by mutual interest and deference.
Miss Universe, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 120cm
Escalator, 2013, acrylic on board, 120 x 90cm
Let’s go shopping, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 300cm
Frost recognises that treating space as a solid substance yields both formal and metaphorical possibilities. He embraces the modernist tendancy to construct and carve from archetypal blocks (the cube, the pyramid, the sphere) without polish. This is a principle brought to bear in different ways, and in many paintings we have a sense of space steered between or sliced through. One of the most endearing paintings in the current show is Man (2015). This little figure does not float so much as perch, gingerly, within the void. He wouldn’t want to cause a disturbance. Bathers by a river (2016) manifests a fantastical quality, the scene interspersed with a strange geometry: I can’t help but see a street lamp in the upper left, and wonder if I am looking at human figures or forest sprites. While there are pockets of colour, the vividness of a river scene is absent, as if Frost has sequestered the trees and left us with the pure light and shade of the spaces in between. Compare this with the atmosphere in the extraordinary work Disputants (2015). Here angry bursts ricochet within the
frame, bisecting and entangling the figures. I am reminded of my first and only encounter with the noise, pace and aggression of the squash court: a small black ball cracking off white walls in a too-tight space. It is as if we are looking into an oversized diorama in which a complex construction of social violence is displayed. The power of Disputants lies in the way Frost has manipulated pictorial space as a means to simultaneously compose and degrade the subjects that inhabit it. It is a painting in which we can feel most acutely the critique of human relationships that permeates much of Frost’s current work. While this show is filled with personages, how many of them might we feel an affinity with? More than dispassionate, Frost’s treatment of the human subject seems pointedly callous at times. It is disquieting to realise that a show entitled ‘human formations’ often presents subjects dehumanised by their situation. And yet, who would expect that an apparently Cubist work like Family unit (2016) could be so soulful? It is a family portrait, with bodily features glowing purple and indistinct under a faint lunar light. The most arresting figure is the parent on the left. Part Lego figure, part Michelin man, he is proud, oafish and sentimental, interlocked with his beloveds. I enjoy thinking about the existential dimension of Frost’s attentiveness to the contingency of our sense of reality. We are matter and we are mortal, and our environments are in some ways incidental – they might just as well have settled into a different configuration. But there is no nihilism to be found in this arbitrariness. Frost denies personhood to many of his subjects in order to give form to that which we don’t always see, or feel empowered to evaluate, in the patterns of our relations. The paradox is that while Frost dissolves subjectivity into a world in flux, his way of seeing urges us to preserve our sense of autonomy within it.
Great escalator, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 270 x 150cm
Laura Fisher is an arts researcher whose interests include socially engaged art, urban cycling cultures, Australian Indigenous art and cross-cultural encounters. She also loves painting even though she doesn’t get to do it very often. Laura is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney.
Roaming, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 160 x 166cm
Author, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 137 x 122cm
Clowning, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 56 x 76cm
Family unit, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 198 x 152cm
One another, 2015, acrylic on board, 70 x 80cm
Mr Bygone, 2015 acrylic on board, 51 x 41cm
Disputants, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 170cm
On the committee, 2016, acrylic on board, 120 x 180cm
Man, 2015, acrylic on board, 65 x 80cm
Bathers by a river, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 240cm
Live feed, 2016, acrylic on board, 140 x 100cm
Flip-up table, 2015, acrylic on board, 122 x 104cm
Triumvirate, 2015, acrylic on board, 60 x 80cm
Walkers, 2016, acrylic on board, 140 x 100cm
Dancing in the moonlight, 2015 acrylic on board, 150 x 80cm
Head on red, 2015, acrylic on board, 100 x 140cm
Joe Frost HUMAN FORMATIONS 2016
© Joe Frost © Laura Fisher Photography: Michel Brouet Design: Kim Shaw Printing: Clickpress Group ISBN 978-0-646-95611-4
9 780646 956114 >
Watters Gallery Tue & Sat: 10am – 5pm Wed - Fri: 10am – 7pm 109 Riley Street, East Sydney, 2010 T: 02 9331 2556 F: 02 9361 6871 info@wattersgallery.com www.wattersgallery.com
back cover: Green-eyed monster, 2015, acrylic on board, 105 x 90cm