Front cover: 1. From the Depths 2001 Above: 2. Study for From the Depths 2000
JAMES GLEESON
1915 - 2008
From the Depths Opening: 6–8pm Wednesday 29 July 2015 Closing: Saturday 15 August 2015 Paintings & Works on Paper from James Gleeson’s Estate
WATTERS GALLERY 109 Riley Street, East Sydney NSW 2010 Tel: (02) 9331 2556 Fax: (02) 9361 6871 www.wattersgallery.com info@wattersgallery.com Hours: 10am–5pm Tues & Sat, 10am–7pm Wed to Fri
For his entire working life James Gleeson was called a Surrealist. He didn’t deny the association and the label may have saved him from having to explain his paintings, but he outlived the organised movement by many decades and found himself belonging neither to its ideology and period style, nor to the utterly different forms of art that prevailed during his later life. Now that we are gaining some distance upon Gleeson’s complete oeuvre its undiminished power calls to be understood in the context of its origins, which seem to me to lie in much older precedents than Surrealism, far back along the timeline of art history and perhaps with two painters in particular.
And the inexplicable allusions within these engorged viscera and spreadeagled limbs, allusions to common objects and figures from life and art, bring us near the same frontier of recognition prospected centuries ago by Gleeson’s other possible precursor, Hieronymus Bosch: a zone where things that ought not make sense strike a dark chord. There is no moral tale in Gleeson’s universe though, no lesson. His are modern paintings, and the closer we look the slighter our mooring in representation becomes, the image dissolving into micro-compositions of brushstroke, colour and oily matter. Bosch, but no God; Turner without the concept of Progress.
The first is J.M.W. Turner. Observing the encompassing dynamics of Gleeson’s paintings we cannot fail to recognize his influence. The vaporous sweeps of energy, the interplay between uplift and downdraft are inheritances that Gleeson openly acknowledged. But where the propulsion of Turner’s vortex created momentum beyond the canvas’s four edges - an ecstatic feeling of release - Gleeson treated the frame as a grand portal onto a display. Drawn in, we find Sublime Nature reconstituted as offal, the human psyche held horrifyingly captive in a physiology that is mostly animal, partly mechanical and occasionally buttressed by elements of architecture.
As a young man Gleeson shared in the avant-garde hope that art could revolutionise perception and actually heal society. Surrealists plumbed the psyche with therapeutic intent. But the paintings and drawings of his long, late flowering seem to have issued from the more immediate impulse to discover the scope of his inventive capacity and deepen a metaphor. That is the paradox of Gleeson. A vision in which the transcendent light shines upon organs devoid of consciousness nourishes itself with apparently endless fecundity, and the pictures are extraordinarily beautiful. Joe Frost, June 2015
3. Conjunction 1994
4. No. 359 25.4.08
5. Down Draught 1994
6. Study for A Consort of Enigmas 2001
7. A Consort of Enigmas 2001
8. No. 533 26.8.08
9. In Range of Memory 1997
10. A Different Matter 2007
11. The Arrival 2007
12. No. 357 24.4.08
James Gleeson - From the Depths 1.
From the Depths 2001 oil on linen 130.3 x 175.5cm
2.
Study for From the Depths 2000 charcoal, ink & wash, paper collage on white wove paper 37.9 x 50.8cm (irreg)
3.
Conjunction 1994 oil on linen 177 x 133cm
4.
No. 359 25.4.08 charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper 41.9 x 59.4cm
5.
Down Draught 1994 oil on linen 131.5 x 177cm
6.
Study for A Consort of Enigmas 2001 charcoal, paper collage on white wove paper 37.9 x 51cm
7.
A Consort of Enigmas 2001 oil on linen 132 x 177cm
8.
No. 533 26.8.08 charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper 27.9 x 41.9cm
9.
In Range of Memory 1997 oil on linen 131.5 x 177cm
10.
A Different Matter 2007 oil on linen 111 x 149cm
11.
The Arrival 2007 oil on linen 92 x 122cm
12.
No. 357 24.4.08 charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper 56.9 x 76.8cm