Pat Larter Paintings Legge Gallery, 18 June - 6 July

Danila Vasilieff coined the phrase "ghastly good taste" in derision of certain of his modernist contemporaries: painters such as Kandinsky and the Bauhaus artists who had, in his view, reduced art to polite compositional sport (1). Ghastly good taste would seem to be ubiquitous, the only change being in the particular form it assumes. Today we see it in the clean, colourless, minimal aesthetic. Long since disassociated from the politics that drove Minimalism in the 1970s, the minimal aesthetic is being used at the top end of every market. It informs the way products look (everything from cars to art), and the style in which they are advertised. Of course the minimal can be beautiful, but so often it is coolly incommunicative and seems to close the door on visual experience.

At Legge Gallery into the first week of July, fourteen exultant paintings by the late Pat Larter served as a reminder of how vigorously she defied the "less is more" ethic. In contrast to the chicanery of many of her contemporaries, Larter's intent as a painter was straightforward. She used the mass-produced materials of visual celebration - fluorescent acrylic paints, glitter and cheap trinkets - to make ebullient abstract images. One is used to seeing these materials used artlessly in ill-conceived craft projects. (Larter's weaker works drop towards that level. Forms don't quite gel, the composition slackens and as a result the paint is simply garish.) But the best of her paintings - and they are a healthy proportion of the total output - effect a transformation. The artist's strange compositional sense, driven by an intuitive feeling for shape and colour, endows glitzy materials with considerable aesthetic weight. Time and again the paintings present genuinely unexpected formal resolutions. One discovers in them a sense of rightness that is real, but seems contrary to every conventional idea of good taste. And far from representing purely formal ideas, the paintings transmit the joy of life and creativity. Made with relish, they avail the viewer of all the pleasures of looking.

Paintings as rude as Pat Larter's will always polarise audiences; they will continue to be loved and hated. But it cannot be denied that she achieved an original contribution to abstract painting, and overcame one of the major problems facing painters at any time (but particularly in her period): how to embody thought and convey feeling through a physically resistant, historically-loaded medium. That she achieved this in a working life shorter even than those of Van Gogh, Seurat or Masaccio (Larter started painting at the late age of 55 and died only five years later) makes the achievement more remarkable.

1.See Bernard Smith Australian Painting 1788-2000, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p.223.

-Ernest Foster

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