JAMES GLEESON

Greythorn Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney

There is no evidence of damage or retouching under UV inspection.
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Before the paintings of the 1980s, with their ambitious scale, their strange cloud, coast and crustacean forms and their weird crepuscular light, James Gleeson was probably best known for his so-called 'psychoscapes', 'spongey Technicolour landscapes inhibited by miniature muscle men'.¹ 

In these works the veteran surrealist combined decalcomania (transfer-printed) blotscapes, not unlike the automatic-accidental abstractions of Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, with the sharp figurative realism of Salvador Dali or Paul Delvaux.  Against settings of melting geology, Gleeson arrayed carefully-posed solitary heroes: nude figures drawn from life, from physical culture magazines and/or from classical statuary.  (In the present work, for example, the reclining figure at the right is taken from a third century BC Hellenistic marble, the so-called 'Barberini Faun'). Gleeson has explained that 'the impulse behind [these works] was to create in the background, a very free, spontaneous space, landscape, whatever you like, I used different methods - decalcomania, straight painting but it was fantasy, it was invention, then I put into it these little painted nude figures which were extremely realistic, with the idea of implying that not only they but the surrounding thing was realistic too.  It was super-real.'²

Small in scale, but presented in extended sequences, these paintings often address Greek myths (and their Freudian and Jungian associations and archetypes): the adventures of Hercules, Orion, Perseus, the Argonauts, Odysseus, Orpheus... Amongst these stories the tale of Icarus, the boy whose high-flying ambition cost him his life, was a particular favourite; he appears on a number of occasions, from the single figure Icaruses of 1955 and 60 to the twelve-panel Daedalus and Icarus sequence of 1964, to the present work, with its complex assemblage of figures.  The Dream of Icarus is in fact one of the most ambitious of Gleeson's 'psychoscapes'.  It is one of several larger paintings from the second half of the 1960s (such as the triptych A Cloud of Witnesses (1966, Queensland Art Gallery), After the Fall (1966, National Gallery of Australia) and The Trap (1971, Rockhampton City Art Collection)), in which the decalcomania background is integrated into a more legible, rational perspective scheme, and in which the nudes are contained within womb-like shells or caves. 

In the left foreground of the present work is a mound of dismembered limbs, which anticipate the profusion of protrusions in the 1980s paintings, while on a dance floor/communion plate/amputated breast form at right stand several monstrous hybrid bodies: double-headed torsos (like the double-bodied figures in the earlier Spring (1956, National Gallery of Victoria) and headless, quadruple-legged ones.  Above these mutations rises an epergne of oyster shells or bracket fungus, each shelf or petal supporting a handsome muscle boy.  The pentagonal structure is deliberate, but also deliberately ambiguous.  The five youths could stand for the five fingers of a hand, for the five senses, or they could derive from Christian iconography: the five wounds of Christ or the five sacraments.  Whatever the subconscious motivation, Gleeson's use of the mystic number adds to the works dream-like feel, to the heavy surrealist portentousness which both legitimates and undermines its brazen homoerotic display.

1. Robert Rooney, The Age, 19 December 1979, p. 2
2. James Gleeson, interviewed 9 April 2003, quoted in Gleeson: Paintings and Works on Paper 1930s - 1990s (exhibition catalogue), Eva Breuer Art Dealer, Sydney, 2003, p. 12