Verified Mysteries

Mysteries come in many forms and don’t always issue from the darkness. The light-filled pictorial universe that Cypriot-born, London-educated Andrew Christofides has prospected since the 1980s harbours certain mysteries, even though his paintings seem to be governed by decidedly rational precepts. Evolving Hierarchies, his current exhibition at King Street Gallery on William, Sydney, is a comprehensive demonstration of the strength of this Sydney painter’s current work, inviting the question: how is it that careful organisation and deliberate execution produce a sense of such open possibility?

Unusually for an Australian painter—if indeed Christofides is that—it is helpful for the newcomer to know something of British modernism’s less prominent, late developments. At the Chelsea School of Art in the 1970s Christofides found his way to abstraction, but his full radicalisation to systematic methods of composition occurred under the influence of artists like Malcolm Hughes and Anthony Hill, who had turned to random numerical ratios for a solution to an old artistic problem: how to sidestep the limitations of habit in the composition of visual structures.

While still incorporating those methods in his current work, Christofides has long since permitted himself to compose from imagination and has bolstered his vocabulary of “pure,” geometric shapes with motifs from a wide range of sources including historical maps, ikons and altarpieces. The title Evolving Hierarchies refers to a continuing synthesis in his painting, which sometimes sees him reaching back to the systematic, non-hierarchic approach of earlier years, but is now more likely to involve a subjective arrangement of evocative forms.

Paintings such as Evangelists, 2022, and Finding a Voice, 2021, come close to figuration, as clusters of shapes stand in for human agents or, at least, emotional conditions. By contrast, the series The Fates of Small Children, 2023, in which each work contains a unique multitude of small shapes within a large, encompassing circle, has few nameable reference points. Functioning less as memoir, it is an abstraction of the flux of life. If the title makes an oblique reference to the horrors of contemporary war, no such violence is apparent in the paintings.

Evolving Hierarchies presents many of the artist’s preliminary works on paper, dog-eared and scrawled with calculations. Popular for their informality, some viewers prefer their exploratory energy to the finality of the paintings. What the paintings make possible, though, is the play of shapes at a scale that imparts each hand-painted zone (no masking tape is used) with amplitude. The tonal control of Christofides’s palette works dynamically on the eye, every patch of colour keyed to its neighbour to induce a gliding perception, belying the clean breaks between areas. Evolving Hierarchies is memorable not only for its many fine works, but for its presentation of an artist who has managed to extend the reach of his enquiry and make an original contribution to the art of painting, with scant acknowledgment from our collecting institutions.

From abstract reflections on the fates of small children to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where the 24^th Biennale of Sydney includes work by the Balinese painter I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, also known as Murni, whose childhood suffering was an impetus to artistic expression. Lent by Singapore’s Gajah Gallery, the ten small, to medium-sized paintings bear no outward signs of pain or rage but offer a curious medley of metamorphoses in which all depicted entities—whether animate or inanimate and however gendered—pulse with a weird but compelling life force.  

Murni was subjected to sexual abuse by her father. After being employed as a seamstress in her adolescence and then as a jeweller she trained as a painter in the style of the Pengosekan School during her twenties, ultimately adapting its traditional conventions to her own prolifically expanding body of work. While recognised in Indonesia and beyond as a maverick artist and champion for female self-determination in a patriarchal society, she died of cancer in 2006 at just thirty-nine years of age.

Without knowledge of her biography the observer might well wonder about the preponderance of wild, phallic forms in the paintings. They flop in clusters and appear in places where there is no logical reason for them to be, in one potentially unsettling instance taking the place of the human head. Yet even when Murni’s work is at its most provocative it is highly sociable, in the sense of being enjoyable to look at and inviting prolonged consideration. Complex hybrids are conjured simply, with a light touch that belies the artist’s exceptional capacity for visual invention. While a painter driven solely by the need for catharsis might have reached for the easy triggers of expression, Murni met the gamut of her experience—horrendous and joyous—with a vivid imagination, producing an oeuvre that is genuinely important for society, and that holds her in our sight as an artist who triumphed over violence.  

A place like Sydney has no shortage of laneway aesthetes, alert to the magnificent items the city occasionally discards, but few people would trouble themselves to adopt and house the largest of these broken objects and fewer still would commune with them at length to determine what bearing they might have on the mysteries of art. In the aesthetics of nil intent that is exactly what sculptor Gary Deirmendjian has done, bringing to the shabby white cube of SLOTprojects, Sydney, a personal collection that has among its gems a perpetually re-stapled noticeboard from Sydney University, an array of twisted cork wires from some New Year’s Eve past and a silkscreen bearing one hand’s ghostly ink-path.

Deirmendjian’s intuition that this all means something proves to be sound, for this room of objects, in which the paint-splattered floor is such an important factor that the artist has named and claimed it among the exhibits, manifests exactly the kind of radiant presence normally associated with verified, human-made art. Artists: celebrate the mystery or despair, as you wish.

EXHIBITIONS

Andrew Christofides: Evolving Hierarchies 
2 – 27 April 2024 
King Street Gallery on William, Sydney

The 24th Biennale of Sydney: Ten Thousand Suns 
9 March – 10 June 2024 
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney 

Gary Deirmendjian: The Aesthetics of Nil Intent
15 March – 20 April 2024
SLOTprojects, Sydney