It's a beautiful day Art Gallery of New South Wales Until 9 February

Review by Richard Lamarck

These days people write about one artwork as being more contemporary than another in the same way you might say that one is more minimal than the other, or more expressionistic, without actually expressing anything. "The contemporary" falls within some vague aesthetic boundaries that constitute a style. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales there is an exhibition of mid-career painters, each working in a manner deemed to be contemporary. Whether the artists themselves set out to be considered contemporary, or whether the title was bestowed on them is another matter.

The only unifying feature of the works on display in It's a beautiful day is the use of kitsch and/or retro elements by the twelve artists. This almost appears to be the theme of the exhibition. The main offender is Anne Wallace with her poorly executed “bien lache” (smoothed-over brush strokes) realism featuring stylized model types placed in settings reminiscent of film set interiors from the early 60’s. Her painting Lotus Eaters comes complete with go-go dancers, a lava lamp and a couple passing a joint. Matthys Gerber has two huge heads on show, painted in garish acidic colours with their outlines resembling a Mandelbrot pattern. They have all the virtuosity of a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt or an Art Express reject. Vivienne Shark LeWitt's paintings resemble old cartoons from magazines like The New Yorker, only coloured in. Although having a hint of humanity in an otherwise dead room, the works fail to deliver much more than 30 seconds of enjoyment. Contemporary art has become like advertising - get the message across in under a minute (if there is a message) and move along - nothing more to see here. The problem with retro and kitsch is that they are a mockery of the past or of the unaesthetic without actually proposing a new element or the solution to aesthetic problems. Raafat Ishak has a series of very surgical looking architectural paintings, which read like the designs of the Bauhaus architects (colours brought to you by Johannes Itten). Although satisfying from a design point of view the work is cold and only demonstrates the artist's ability to play with the formalism of others. Another painter whose work is colder than Leagues Club air conditioning is Brent Harris. The works from his grotesquerie series feature flat, stylized shapes of monster-like figures engaged in what appear to be quite unsavoury sexual acts. Mainly in black and white with minimal colour the works, after initial mild disgust, fail to leave anything for gestation.

Derek O’Connor and Peter Booth make an interesting pairing, both having in their works a sense of the post apocalyptic nightmare. In O’Connor's work this feeling is most pronounced in the landscapes like Clean Plastic Park where chromatically unfriendly hues cancel each other out in the fight for supremacy, leaving a cold dead planet. This artificial world is reiterated, but not wholly successfully, by his use of superfluous effects and paint as the main subject. Booth's works, however, with a semblance of humanity still just barely detectable in the bleak landscapes, offer us a way into that world and are the more powerful for it. David Jolly's small realist paintings of exit ramps and the lifeless world of the Australian highway usually viewed in a blur from the car window offers little more, visually or mentally, than the photographs that they were painted from would have. However the medium used by Jolly, oil on glass, is itself interesting and warrants closer inspection than do the images themselves. Tim McMonagle's work is sketchily painted with the flavour of old-fashioned advertising illustration, which fits in with the whole retro atmosphere of the show. The other Tim in the exhibition, Maguire, offers two large paintings of fruit shown at a huge scale. Maybe he should have worked in demolition - he’s always blowing things up. The paintings are well handled but again, as with the rest of the show, very detached, a clean example of mechanical painting, planned and executed thoughtfully.

Julie Dowling's works painted in the manner of storybook illustration relate to her own family history. Next to each painting is a written account of what the image represents, without which the paintings would offer very little meaning. Although interesting from a biographical or historical standpoint there is little to recommend these works as paintings in their own right.

I do not enjoy writing such negative reviews but it worries me to think that people coming to the Art Gallery of New South Wales from overseas or people who never go to commercial galleries should think that this exhibition is the cream of what is being produced in this country. It is pretty well accepted that curators, when organising an exhibition of contemporary practitioners, mainly include people that they know or have some contact with. This is what I am telling myself anyway, because the only other alternative is that there are people out there in the artistic community who think that this is as good as it gets.

Richard Lamarck is an independent critic.

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