An artist needs to be ever alert to the underlying mood of the culture, a philosophy epitomised by both the Surrealists and Symbolists.
Travis MacDonald is the winner of the 2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize with a depiction of a fountain on a balmy evening. There are a few lessons to be learned from his moody rendition of submission to the elements.
I caught up with Peter Atkins, whose painting Fruit and Vegetables was also selected for the prize. The painting was used in signage for the exhibition.
“I put it in because of the 18 metre-wide billboard on the freeway to Geelong,” said Atkins. They are both modular works designed by him that flag his interest in roads.
Three paintings stood out amongst the thirty-one selected as finalist. Those of MacDonald, Atkins and Eleanor Louise Butt, whose yellow abstract rendition of sunshine Surge (cascading yellow abstraction) stands boldly at the entrance to the show.
What sets the winner apart is the way he brings together the image and his statement on the 100 year anniversary of the birth of Surrealism, a time when art historians and curators are looking back at past movements.
André Breton wrote his Surrealist manifesto a century ago and there will be exhibitions around the world celebrating this moment, including a Magritte exhibition in Sydney.
Pleasure in the unknown was at the heart of the Surrealist philosophy and Macdonald taps into the poetics of fountains with his painting The top of the pond.
Ostensibly a study of public fountains, Macdonald soon reveals his allegiance to a “tricked-out Monet idea”. “Light travels in straight lines, enters water, water falls on a path of least resistance,” he writes. “The parable load of the fountain of youth, of futility/libido, knowledge of rest and restlessness is traversable.”
The painting depicts a prone figure subservient to the cascading fountain of his imagination, a Symbolist idea, in what Macdonald calls “a polite and mundane disorder”. The painting apparently refers to a particular fountain in Princes Park near the artist’s studio which is turned off in winter.
Some artists’ statements, such as MacDonald’s, make good reading. Those with referents more closely allied to art history such as the cut painting of Huseyin Sami can be more impressive than information about the artist’s viewing habits on the internet.
Peter Atkins is an excellent storyteller. His striking painting Fruit and Vegetables extracts the design elements out of panels seen at fruit and vegetable markets.
He currently has an exhibition on at Tolarno Galleries of work made up of hard edge panels that continue his flirtation with consumer culture. One is a Bunnings sign observed in Sydney Road with the text stripped away. The pop art influences come from his working class background in Newcastle, Atkins says.
There were 550 entries into this annual acquisitive art prize which challenges painters to come clean about their ideas. Even minimalist hard edge work or colour studies can demonstrate that the artist lives in the real world and has incorporated ideas from it into his or her practice.
2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize
Geelong Gallery, Little Malop Street, Geelong
Exhibition continues to 3 November 2024
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.geelonggallery.org.au for details.
Images: Travis MacDonald, The top of the pond, 2024, oil on linen – reproduced courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne | Eleanor Louise Butt, Surge (cascading yellow abstraction), 2024, oil on cotton – courtesy of the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne | Peter Atkins, Fruit and Vegetables, 2022–24, synthetic polymer paint on board – courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, and GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide
Words: Rhonda Dredge