JEFFREY SMART

Australian Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 2003

Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Sydney, October 2003, cat. no. 12

Sacha Grishin, 'Jeffrey Smart's eternal order of light and balance', Jeffrey Smart: Paintings and Studies 2002 - 2003, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 2003, pp. 10-11 (illus. p. 22)

The work is framed in gold with a linen slip. In excellent condition. No visible defects, damage or retouching through UV inspection.
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Jeffrey Smart's The President Factory is a relatively recent work, but one of some significance; both the finished painting and the first study are reproduced in Barry Pearce's 2005 monograph.¹  This fine study supports John McDonald's observation on Smart's late work, that 'his compositions strive for a sense of stillness and monumentality: while his subjects are almost wilfully ordinary'.² 
The subject is typically deadpan, even banal. Originally sketched by the artist while seated his car in a wrecker's yard on the Arezzo industrial estate, The President Factory shows the view up an overgrown embankment, past a fence and invisible roadway, to the top of the eponymous fabbrica's white concrete walls and its bold neon sign. Out of this untidy quotidian reality Smart wrestles a composition of arresting elegance and simplicity. Introducing an imaginary wall on the right, he slices the picture plane into two horizontal zones and one vertical, divisions made in accordance with the proportions of his beloved Golden Section. There are also three distinct spatial registers: the close-up of the poster wall, the even recession of the grassy slope and the more complex, staggered zone of fence, truck, buildings and sky.

As Sacha Grishin describes it: 'Spatially an enormous tension is established between the gentle sloping surface of the billboard with its dramatic and mysterious shadow, the factory wall with its prefabricated concrete shells, the huge diagonally receding 'president" sign and the lovingly observed and immaculately depicted wall of grass and flowers..."³ The President Factory certainly displays the artist's delight in the rendering of surface: the discoloured and weathered concrete column with its geometric, brightly-coloured posters: the furry rippling pelt of the grassy slope - a favourite texture that goes back forty-years, as far as Cooper Park (1962); the crisp, repetitive-industrial stripes of the corrugated factory walls.

It also shows Smart's irrepressible wit, his weakness for the visual or verbal pun. On the right of the first study, a billboard carries advertisements for the 'Circo di Praga', overlaid with smaller rectangles inscribed 'Miro estetica'. Perhaps these latter are simply another Smart art world allusion, posters for a Joan Miró exhibition. However, it should be noted that 'miro' is somewhat ambiguous. In Italian, the verb mirare means to gaze or stare, and by metaphorical extension to aim or set one's sights upon something. In a typical Smartian play with words, the text of the poster changes and the verb is conjugated through the sequence of three paintings, from miro (I gaze) to miri (you gaze) to mira (he gazes). In the second, the present work, Smart literally commands or challenges the viewer to follow him in facing, exploring and enjoying the complexity and richness of visual perception and aesthetic response.

We are most grateful to Stephen Rogers for his assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. Barry Pearce, Jeffrey Smart, The Beagle Press, Sydney, pp. 232-33
2. John McDonald, in Jeffrey Smart: recent paintings, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 2005, p. 4
3. Sacha Grishin, 'Jeffrey Smart's eternal ordr of light and balance', in Jeffrey Smart: Paintings and Studies 2002 - 2003, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 2003, p. 11