gravity system response

BLACKARTPROJECTS & ASH KEATING PRESENT

B L A C K

GRAVITYSYSTEMRESPONSE

524 Flinders524 Flinders StreetMelbourne, Australia14 - 23 April, 2015


The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous: The instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider, the picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.

Mark Rothko

Ash Keating would never describe himself as someone who performs miracles through the agency of his work. However, his works are poetic and empathetic and have an intimacy which encourages contemplation on what Rothko describes as eternally familiar needs. While Keating’s practice is diverse and exploratory, it is held together by his abiding and long-standing interest in the landscape and its place in a contemporary world. His work is

not simply a reflection on current environmental issues, which would limit its reading to one within a political context only. Rather it engages with a broader humanistic philosophy where the artist explores the landscape in the context of our relationship with it.

While Keating is best known for his large-scale outdoor spray-painted murals, his performances and interventions and his video-based artworks, he has in more recent times returned to studio-based painting: an approach with which he began when attending art school. This new body of work, Gravity System Response, is the most recent outcome of Keating’s “studio time”.

This series of work, dominated by an intense deep red hue created by the continuous layering of thinly applied paint, shimmers and invites the viewer to step into and merge with the paintings. Regardless of scale they form part of the viewer’s

immediate environment, creating a place of solace, as if one is standing before an endless landscape overcome by its sublime beauty. The works undoubtedly read as landscapes, however, they oscillate in perspective and impression. Gravity System Response #1, a five metre long diptych that envelopes the viewer with its intensity of colour and enormity of scale, has a sense of depth where one feels as if they are looking into a warm and luxurious void. A space where one can weave in, out and sideways throughout its multiple layers of washed paint. One does not so much look at this painting as they do through it. In contrast works such as Gravity System Response #4, 5 and 6, all single panels, have a distinct verticality which forces the viewer to look at rather than through the work; as if confronted by a densely forested woodland or a steeply rising hillside. In these works the horizon line is more defined and the layers of dripping paint more solid. One feels as if they peer over the


canopy into a void beyond the surface.

These studio-based works are intimately linked with Keating’s broader practice. They instantly relate, both conceptually and technically, to a work such as West Park Proposition. They are created using a similar process—the spraying of paint to create multiple layers that both cover and build upon each other—and conceptually they both aim to create an extension of the landscape in alternative spaces, reminding us of the beauty and solemnity of the environment which we too often take for granted. These Gravity System Response paintings also closely align with much of Keating’s video works which have a similar lushness and richness and celebrates the intensity of the painterly. Lastly, this series fits squarely within Keating’s approach to use poetry, humanity and empathy to make comment about the environment and the pressures it has faced since industrialisation. They

remind us of the power and the beauty of the world in which we live and as such they gently ask us to consider what we potentially have to loose.

However, it would be wrong to merely consider these paintings as of or after the landscape. While hinting at the soul of the Australian landscape—the desert red of the interior—and composed with the semblance of a horizon line, these paintings, similar to much of Keating’s practice, have a deep spiritual and emotive quality. Like Rothko’s celebrated paintings, Keating’s works are ethereal, spiritual and ultimately human. They have the power to move us and to link us to the “other”. They are an experience and a revelation and they help us understand and see our world through a different lens.

Dr Vincent Alessi

Gravity System Response #1 (2015)synthetic polymer on linen, oak frame2 panels, 202 x 564 cm

Gravity System Response #2 (2015)synthetic polymer on linen, oak frame202 x 291.5 cm

Gravity System Response #3 (2015)synthetic polymer on linen, oak frame195.5 x 137.5 cm

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gravity system response

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