A SUBLIME WASTING IN THE BLACK “PAINTINGS" OF SCOTT REDFORD
This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black…ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away… Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Des Esseintes shuddered with delight at feeling himself lost in this terrifying world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog, involved in this incessant activity, and caught up in this ruthless machine… Huysmans, A Rebours Like disembodied souls floating textureless in books, they are waiting to be reborn, to be recreated, to feel the actuality of their reality. Imants Tillers, In Perpetual Mourning
This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black…ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away…
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Des Esseintes shuddered with delight at feeling himself lost in this terrifying world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog, involved in this incessant activity, and caught up in this ruthless machine…
Huysmans, A Rebours
Like disembodied souls floating textureless in books, they are waiting to be reborn, to be recreated, to feel the actuality of their reality.
Imants Tillers, In Perpetual Mourning
With the “neo-Pop, neo-minimalist, and neo-conceptualist” artists of International With Monument, those “Sons of Sonnabend", the flavour of the month in New York, an examination of the black “paintings” of Scott Redford is timely.1 Reflecting back images from New York, as screened through Flash Art and other international art mags, this young Gold Coast artist looks across the world-glass darkly.
Redford's career is at a post-launch start. His first black “painting”, Fear of Text, was made in 1983, and his first solo exhibition, Love + Pride, was held at the IMA in Brisbane in 1986. There followed in 1987 The Flag of Convenience at Bellas Gallery, Love and Sadness at the Gold Coast Cultural Centre, and Machine at MOCA Large black floor-pieces were included in all four solo exhibitions. In 1988 Redford will show at ACCA in Melbourne, and again at Bellas. In short, Redford remains a relatively unknown young "Brisbane” artist.
Redford's black works mix a runaway Pop/pseudo-expressionist opulence with a tough conceptual/minimal/constructivist fantasy, and mix it with the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Scott Redford, Veil, 1987. Photograph: Richard Stringer.
Scott Redford, Installation view, Untitled (Floorpiece), Bellas Gallery, 1987. Collection: James Baker. Photograph: Richard Stringer.
