Unity Lane Projects
Perth, Western Australia
3-18 November 2018
Darryn Ansted,
Walker, 2016, Oil on linen, 71 x 51 cm
Looking for Clews
To be confronted by a puzzle can be at once both a charming
and an intimidating experience. A puzzle is a test of intelligence, a quality
that though always important, has become increasingly valued. A puzzle tests us,
and the outcome must be unambiguous–indeed in ancient Greek and Roman
mythology, a wrong answer could mean death. But the charm of puzzles is also
alluring. A maze is a visual puzzle that has its own beauty, but for Theseus,
the Labyrinth was also a life testing experience.
Darryn Ansted presents a series of paintings in this
exhibition Aspects of a Puzzle that
engage with an architectural motif that appears both modernist and suburban.
The colours and light that infuse these landscapes is pleasant and is
recognisable as a West Coast phenomenon, familiar in both America and
Australia. Titles such as Limelight
and Magnolia further impress, with this
feeling that ‘everything is fine’, but is this an allurement into the trap of
the puzzle?
We are also enticed into puzzles by clues. The Minotaur
inhabited a Labyrinth, in the myth, which was designed by the architect Daedalus,
who also designed a hollow dummy cow in which Pasiphaë could hide to consummate
her love for a beautiful white bull. The Minotaur is the monster love child,
half bull, half human, imprisoned in the Labyrinth until he is eventually slain
by the hero, Theseus. Such was the fate of monsters, for whom there was no
compassion. The maze was so difficult to escape from that Theseus was given a
ball of thread (called a ‘clew’) to use to find his way back out. This is an etymological
root of the modern word ‘clue’, which we need to navigate our way out of a puzzle.
What are the clues that Ansted gives us in his paintings? A
lemon on a table and a figure providing clues for the scale of the spaces represented
in the paintings. There is perspective also (another clue), indicating that
these may be real spaces, but something warns us that this belief is a trap. The
sense of unreality is also ubiquitous
in these works. A tiny figure gazes on a glass and stone monolith framed by
geometric clouds. If de Chirico had lived in San Francisco or Perth, this is
the strange atmosphere he may have painted.
But he didn’t live in either of these places, so this too may be a distraction
or red herring rather than an actual clue.
At some point in an exhibition, as in the Labyrinth, we turn
a bend to find something that may overpower us. Painting exhibitions always
find their final form as a sequence within an architectural setting and in this
case there is architecture inside architecture. Around a corner, somewhere in
this exhibition, can we expect a major work that puts all our fears and
insecurities about our intelligence to the true test? Is this for instance in the
massive Garden, where a cube on a
table reminds us of the shared artifice of both puzzles and paintings? Is this
the clue that lets us safely out of the maze with our reputations intact—or another
allurement? Or, it may be in the earlier, small, beautifully simple, abstract
works such as “Umber” or “Ochre” that provide a ‘clew’, stripped of portent, showing
the path in, in order to indicate the way out.
Aspects of a Puzzle
provides just that, different views of the unnamed problem. There is no
ultimate conflict point or resolution as in the Labyrinth of Crete. Instead we
hover inside one space then glide to the next. Within the presence of these
paintings we stay suspended and engaged in their many intriguing qualities.
Dr Kevin Robertson, 2018
