Koulla Roussos

  • Artist

  • Curator

  • Blog

  • Contact

  • Blog

  • More

    Painting ghosts-fleeting thoughts on an art work one year on

    June 2, 2019

    Travis Vella’s “To those that were missing” (2018) is a medium size oil on board, a representational work, depicting four female figures in the format of a family snapshot. Three of these figures are older women clad in vintage clothing, sensible collared dresses, one in blue, one in yellow and another in red. 


    The figures are standing in front of black panes encased in grey window frames. The fourth, a stunted young girl, hovers in front of the three. She is depicted in one singular monochrome fluorescent yellow. Look more closely and all figures are without legs. Their eyes are hollow. Their arms lack substance. They are shape shifting, they might be ghosts.

     


    I purchased the artwork from Vella’s solo exhibition, “I don’t believe in ghosts”, which opened on 1 June 2018 at Neon Parlour in Thornbury. The exhibition was about ghosts and more broadly about representation and that which can be hinted at, but which remains unseen. A year on, the artwork has required further attention to make the point that, in the age of digital photographic proliferation, a painting has certain enduring qualities which I can return to for critical contemplation.

    For his 2018 exhibition, Vella produced a suite of paintings, by working simultaneously across the surfaces of multiple panels. His process involved building layers, laying down images, moving across surfaces playing with paint, building all the works simultaneously until they were loaded with just enough tension.

     

    The tactile, handmade aspects are evident at the outset. Vella mixed his paints from pigments. He began with an acrylic base before layering the works with oil paints. By lining the board as such with acrylic paint to arrest the oil paint from reacting with the wood, Vella is securing its archival appeal. He intends that his work of art about a fleeting subject matter survive for future consideration.

    “To those that were missing”, was developed from several vintage photographic images Vella had sourced from personal archives. The subjects in this painting can be described as kindly, indifferent and malevolent. These are images without substance, illusions, vapours or clouds of light, perhaps even hallucinations, some might say the result of a disturbed mind. However, these are images that have been developed by a trained artist to convey tension between the materiality of the forms and the materials, with the ethereal nature of the subject matter.


    They are also forms that have been developed from photographic images, to explore the historical tension between photography and painting.

    Historically, photography contributed to the existential plight of painting as an artform. Why represent reality when a photo can capture it with complete verisimilitude? However, what a painting commands is singularity. Unlike a photograph, it cannot be reproduced.

    Photography, a transparent medium, purports to present the subject matter as it was captured by the objective lens of the camera. Photography is also a process that can record unintended effects. For example, the capture of the shadow of the photographer inside the frame of the photograph with a click.

    The historical tension between painting and photography has given rise to the contentious claim that photography lacks the repetition and variation of painting, that the photograph lacks evidence of the artist’s hand.

    As photography developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, painters strove to re-define their medium to represent that which the camera could not.

     

    Painters considered the representation of forms limited by the surface’s two dimensions. Textures were interrogated, as were the essences of colour, the gestural instances of lines, of mark making; every step was examined to distinguish painting from photography.

    Paradoxically, painting became a way of representing that which could not or should not be seen. It is ironical therefore, that Vella’s subject matter about ghosts, depicts that which otherwise remains unseen, virtually impossible to capture with a camera. 

    Describing himself as a neo-narrative painter, Vella immersed himself inside a strict regime, exploring techniques with brushes and strokes, engrossed in the soundscape of musical scores, pushing what could be done with oil paint and teasing its limits to achieve sublimation, his very own personal expression, mysterious and transcendent in material form.

    Scientific explanations exist for all observable phenomena. Yet there are occurrences which pique our interest in the unknown. Not everything in our lives can be data farmed and forced through algorithmic equations. As Albert Einstein said, “[t]he most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science”.

    Whilst manipulation of photographic technologies can produce haunting and mysterious images, photography’s poignant paradox lies in the photograph’s inherent vice. A photograph deteriorates, a digital one instantaneously so, whereas a well-made painting can survive many hundreds of years.

    In sourcing, depicting and capturing where photography and painting coincide, Vella achieved a poetic synthesis, since the artwork not only stokes our fear of death but acts as a reminder that we are transitory beings in life, ghosts in the field of time.

    Vella’s phantasmagorical subject matter, presenting spectral images, go to the essence of photography, painting and any gesture purporting to leave a trace behind, and just as memento mori operates in art, Vella reminds us that we are all spectral images, apparitions, who will eventually leave no trace and completely disappear.

    It is strange to consider a real object in real time, dealing with a subject that may or may not exist. When you look more closely at ‘To those who were missing’, following the shadow play around the figures, there appears to be a black shadow in the bottom right hand corner, suggesting a presence outside of the painting. Whose shadow is this being depicted: the photographer’s or the painter’s?

    Considering the ubiquity and proliferation of the digital “selfie” coinciding incidentally in an epoch whose zeitgeist can only be described as the “spectacle of vanities”, digital images will disappear leaving no trace, painting the artist in the artwork is infinitely ironic.

     

    Here is Vella embedding the artist into the work, in a masterful stroke, he has usurped the photographer with his own artful selfie. By investing his expressive presence into the work of art, Vella is asserting the primacy of painting, producing works of art that are unique, imitable, singular and original capable of surviving us in historical time, glowing with a spectral aura that only an artist can produce. 

    Tags:

    Travis Vella

    neo narrative art

    painting

    photography

    memento mori

    ghosts

    Melbourne contemporary artist

    art

    art writing

    Koulla Roussos

    Please reload

    Featured Posts

    Eileen Song, Cliffside, on violence as a work of art

    June 25, 2019

    Flash Art, Darwin Landscapes Part 1- The Don Hotel

    October 1, 2013

    Liss Fenwick, Grim Purpose, DVA 30/8/19-13/9/19

    September 13, 2019

    1/10
    Please reload

    Recent Posts

    Therese Ritchie, "If she were as priceless as a Warhol, you'd save her" limited 99 edition screen print, 2020

    July 27, 2020

    The Lighthouse, dir. R. Eggers (2019)

    July 4, 2020

    Humanities

    June 29, 2020

    Exhibition review: ‘Burning hearts’, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT)

    June 4, 2020

    Franck Gohier, "Don't Cough Comrades" 2020 screen print, edition 99

    April 29, 2020

    Easter Saturday, 1974

    April 18, 2020

    On my father’s doubts about art

    December 26, 2019

    The Plague of Florence

    October 29, 2019

    Shit that I Like

    October 7, 2019

    Liss Fenwick, Grim Purpose, DVA 30/8/19-13/9/19

    September 13, 2019

    Please reload

    Search By Tags

    9999

    Australian Contemporary artists

    Contemporary Photography

    Darwin Contemporary Artist

    Fernanda Dupal

    Firenze

    Gianni Pattena

    Gloria Richards

    Grim Purpose

    Humpty Doo

    Koulla Roussos

    Koulla roussos

    Matthew van Roden

    Melbourne

    Peter dermoudy

    Polly Johnstone

    Tarzan JungleQueen

    activism

    alt-modern

    architecture

    archizoom

    art

    art critique

    art exhibition

    art review

    art writing

    artist

    barrister

    city of Darwin

    contemporary art curator

    darwin

    darwin artists

    darwin contemporary arts

    digital artist

    drawing

    envy

    exhibition

    exhibition design

    exhibition layout

    exhibition location

    exhibition review

    fifo

    florence

    futurohome

    history

    installation

    italian

    local history

    mars gallery

    palazzo Strozzi

    palpable voids

    peripatetic

    photographer

    photography

    radicali

    refugees

    review

    room with a view

    sculpture

    student

    travel

    utopian utopie

    yellow

    #contiguityoftotalisation #matthewvanroden #tarzanjunglequeen #koullaroussos #collaboration #installation #performanceart #experimentalvideoart #contemporaryartists #biennaleofaustralianart #boaa #ballarat #darwin #australiancontemporaryartists

    #darwinnt #artsnt #art #contemporaryart #curator

    #koullaroussos #matthewvanroden #tarzanjunglequeen #biennaleofaustralianart #boaa #experimentalvideo #performance #queer #queerart #darwincontemporaryartists #frontier

    150th anniversary

    1869

    Anna Westbrook

    Artist

    Ava Amedi

    COnCREtE

    Cafe Del Art DArwin

    Camus

    Chapter 1

    Chayni Henry

    Contemporary Art

    Contemporary art

    Creature From The Black Lagoon

    D.evolution

    DVAA

    Darwin Art

    Darwin Visual Arts

    Darwin contemporary artists

    Deck Bar Darwin

    Deckchair Cinema

    Delphi Bank

    Dr Sam Wells

    Emma Masters

    Exodus

    Flash Art

    Franck Gohier

    Gary Lee

    Godinymayin Yijard Rivers Arts and Culture Centre

    Greek International Film Festival

    Group V

    Harriet Place

    Insomniaart

    Jetlagart

    Jonathon Saunders

    Koulla Roussos

    Leanne Waterhouse

    Liss Fenwick

    Live Darwin Art

    MAGNT

    Martina Copely

    Matthew van Roden

    Mayfair Gallery

    Melbourne contemporary artist

    Melody Ellis

    Michelle Culpitt

    NAVA

    NCAA

    NT Art

    NT Library

    Nietzsche

    On Vulnerability and Doubt

    Origin Of A City

    Penelope Benton

    Pia Ednie-Brown

    Podvig

    Postchristmas

    Pride NT

    Red Hand prints

    Regis Martin

    Remo Buti

    Robert Eggers

    SSM

    Seperate Ways

    Sholto Buck

    Shu Ling Chua

    Street Art

    TaNTrum

    Travis Vella

    Uncle

    Worlds Apart

    Wrestler

    Zara Sigglekow

    a thousand miles from everywhere

    acca

    aeschylus

    afternoon walk

    agit-prop art

    alexander rodchenko

    architecture

    argument

    art

    art and architecturepodtpopart

    art commission

    art history

    art in the time of corona

    art market

    art monthly

    art monthly australasia

    art of pride

    art print

    art production

    art review

    art writing

    artifice

    artistic irony

    artreview

    australia

    australian artists

    australian centre of contemporary art

    authorship

    aviation

    aviation history

    babel

    banal

    benjamin aitken

    billamuk

    bird

    birds

    biscotti

    bombing of darwin

    bong ramilo

    bruce lee

    bruegel

    burning hearts

    bush fire devastation

    cafe del art

    cage me a peacock

    caligari

    camera

    carla ori

    chinese

    cinema

    cliffside

    cogito ergo sum

    commission

    contemporary art

    contemporary art darwin

    contemporary storytelling

    contructivism

    coronart

    coronavirus

    covid-19

    creative non fiction

    critical theory

    culture

    culture industries

    culture making

    curating in the time of corona

    curation

    curator

    cyclone tracy

    darwin

    darwin art

    darwin artist

    darwin contemporary art

    darwin contemporary artist

    darwin contemporary artists

    darwin curator

    darwin kalymnian

    darwin lap top orchestra

    darwin northern territory

    darwin visual arts

    david collins

    death

    decameron

    deck bar

    design

    dialectic

    digital

    dino hodge

    discipline

    don dale

    don't cough comrades

    dragon

    dream

    dye sublimation print

    dylan voller

    early horror film

    east point road

    ecological collapse

    eileen song

    emerging artist

    emma masters

    empty

    empty buildings

    empty buildings of darwin

    encaustic

    epistemology

    exhibition

    exhibition review

    exhibition writing

    existence

    existential crisis

    experimental

    expressionism cinema

    expressionist film

    fabric

    family snapshot

    fannie bay

    fannie bay gaol

    fantasy genre

    fernandah dahlstrom

    film review

    flaneur

    food

    foucalt

    foucault

    franck gohier

    frankfurt school

    fredrich schultze

    fritz lang

    frontier modernity

    frontier post modernity

    futuro

    game of death

    gardening

    gaze

    george brown darwin botanic gardens

    german cinema

    ghosts

    giotto

    gothic

    goyder

    goyder expedition

    gps and shadows

    greek

    greek easter

    green

    grey