home > art > former resident artists

john foubister

'Open hands and the night,' 1994, oil on canvas, 1838 x 1533cm

'Chair and disguised genitals confronting loneliness,' 1994, pastel on paper, 570 x 385cm

'Mirror. The storm is strong and the craft so frail,' 1994, oil on canvas, 1838 x 1533cm

'Chair through closed hands,' 1994, oil on canvas 1838 x 1220cm

'Pool,' 1994, oil on canvas, 1220 x 920

The big view from the room

Catalogue notes to John's December 1994 exhibition at Rimbun Dahan by Julian Bowron, Director, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia

 'If infinity can be grasped and manipulated using rational thought, does this open the way to an understanding of the ultimate explanation of things without the need for mysticism?  No, it doesn't.'[1]

 The ineffable, the intensely personal and the perverseness of things are the subject matter of John Foubister's paintings.  While this is by no means new territory, the pervasive inclination to rationality, expertise, and the systematic will to a taxonomy of the metaphysical. along with the material which pertains in the current era, makes it a hard road.  Much contemporary art practice prospects rich veins of current theoretical discourse and mines them with alacrity and diligence.  Particular attention is paid to ensuring that the appropriate commentators are on hand to endorse the process.  Consequently, artists' and writers' endeavours are contained within the current orthodoxy.  The bigger picture is less frequently attempted.

 Foubister's interest in quantum physics reflects the 'preoccupations' driving his work 'the big view from the room'.[2]  The artist's recurrent visual language also grapples with the dilemma of reconciling personal and wider relevance.  At first an exhibition of his work can appear disparate, disconcertingly so, but this has to do with an unwillingness to adopt the convenient package of a suite of work systematically or didactically promoting a neat set of ideas, or forming a too-tidy aesthetic hanging.  In his determination, this strategy of discomfort, Foubister aligns with much current installation practice in insisting that the viewers begin to look beyond 'familiar' vocabularies and bring to the work readings of their own informed by various permutations of private, collective and cultural experience.

 Adelaide poet and writer Ken Bolton has referred to Foubister's work as 'paintings for people who are no longer enchanted with painting'[3].  Greenberg's dogma continues to haunt painting, obstructing its ready acceptance as a site of intellectual engagement, despite an irrefutable catalogue of intelligent contemporary work.  The primary obstacle is however not the monolith of modernist notions but the obsessive drive to exorcise the modernist ghost which too often results in a denial of the continuity or histories of practice.    Contemporary conceptual practices and the theoretical concerns which commonly inform them are consequently presented as having somehow spontaneously arrived fully formed and unencumbered by a history of ideas.  Painting site most uncomfortably with this persistent if untenable position because its formalist concerns especially, persistently evidence a long history.  The cult of the curator/specialist has been particularly unhelpful in this respect, focusing opportunistically as it does on the apparently new in order to promote the discovery of 'innovation'.  Edward Said has encapsulated this pervasive dilemma particularly well.

 'Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge;  as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies.'[4]

 In these new works, enhanced by a year's consolidated work away from familiar spheres, a definite narrative emerges from familiar imagery and concerns.  A vivid internal world apears in haunting primordial pictures dominated by dark seas and dense jungles overlaid and intertwined with labial whirlpools and sucking vortexes of swirling paint.  Alternatively grids of flatter colour are a field or a blind for an amorphous figure and the letters 'I f if?'  Or perhaps "JF" the artists self mocking  grandiose signature.  Certainly Foubister teases the seriousness of  the gaze and disarmingly parodies his own self-consciousness.  Often floating in the foreground of the picture plane is a grinning smiley face, the artist returning the viewers' gaze with a wry and at times slightly frightened assurance.

 Foubister knows what can be done with paint, knows well the seductive and lyrical qualities which can so effectively promote sensuality and aesthetic bravado.  Critically he knows also how to withhold the medium from the surface and manipulate by means of latency,, banality and deliberate unpaintedness.  It is by these means, as well as his deliberate jerky narrative, that he invokes a journey which is strange and at times uneasily familiar.  Wider concerns such as the way in which individual subjective reality is 'constructed through the processing of sensory stimuli'[5] consideration of the infinite which 'can be contemplated and symbolised but not known'[6] are intermingle with the obsessively personal, the palpably erotic and a sense of absurdity and pervading doubt.

These are not the ubiquitous media or technologically generated images though which many painters have sought to transcend the 'inescapably precious materials of painting'[7].  These are overtly painted and drawn images consisting of particular and downright expressive marks and technique.  They draw upon Hodgkin, Guston, McCahon and Magritte at least.  Painting unrepentant:  this work demonstrates a thriving practice.

In the work of Australian contemporary visual arts a sustained commitment to making work and maintaining articulate ideas is too often rewarded by a highly marginal existence.  In a recent conversation with an Adelaide artist I found myself all but asserting that this endemic situation somehow works to maintain the urgency and edge necessary for a vital visual culture and was rightly taken to task.  The equation of poverty of means with creative energy as co-dependent factors in sustaining ideas is a sentimental and insidious notion.  Opportunities for artists to concentrate on their work relatively free from financial pressures are all too few.  Foubister's generous residency in Malaysia has been one such opportunity and is reward for great persistence and determination against the odds.

home · about · art · architecture · environment