Dale Frank

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
The Austcorp Group Limited Art Collection; purchased from the above

This work is in good original condition.
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A wunderkind of Australian art, Dale Frank established a substantial reputation both here and in Europe and America in the early 1980s. His swirling psychoscapes were shown in New York, Amsterdam, London, Milan and in the 1984 Venice Biennale, and he consolidated his practice and his reputation over the ensuing decade with vast, extravagant abstract machines of paint and assemblage.

In the late 1980s he set oil and acrylic aside in favour of clear and coloured varnishes. In these pour paintings, the canvas is laid horizontally, with the movement of puddles and waves and runs and drips controlled by tilting; blocks and wedges being constantly inserted, removed and replaced beneath the stretcher as the composition slowly sets over hours, even days. Despite the necessary high levels of knowledge of materials, attention and physical activity required of the artist, the paintings retain a strong element of the accidental and the autotelic. The physical and visible products of this highly idiosyncratic, bravura technique are grand, sensual, baroque confections of rich and shiny colour. Perspectiveless, imageless, they are nevertheless highly suggestive, of both microscopic (atomic, molecular or cellular) and macroscopic (visceral, meteorological, astronomical and cosmological) forms and processes. They also have a creepy, surrealist quality, recalling the kind of protoplasmic nightmares conjured by Salvador Dali or Yves Tanguy, while their acid-trip illogic summons the ghosts of 1970s disco light shows.

Against this spectacular meaninglessness, the artist posits a serious meditation on landscape. The present work is one of an extended series from 1993 entitled Views from the Bruce Highway. The Bruce runs north from Brisbane towards Cairns, and the titles of the works are very precise topographical-experiential descriptions of a road trip through south-east Queensland: View to the White Horse Lookout from the heavy vehicle park Ampol, or The 28 kilometres between Elliot River to Pig Pig Creek, July, cutting out unsightly Qbuild blue metal quarries, or simply Passing Beerwah.

Frank is notorious for his extremely long, fulsome, poetic and often apparently quite irrelevant titles, but in the discrepancy between the appearance of the Bruce Highway paintings and their names he presents us with a very particular perceptual and conceptual challenge. As he puts it: 'If people broadened their perception of what landscape is, and the history of Australian landscape painting, they would be able to embrace non-representational art as landscape instantaneously and simultaneously. Landscape is non-representational, it is an abstract concept to all people. It always was a meaning separate from image.'¹   The present work is an oozing field of shocking scarlet, laced and buffed with contrasting blue-black-grey-cream overpourings, and clearly looks nothing like the landscape of the Tuan State Forest south of Maryborough. But it does force from the viewer an aesthetic response which is closely analogous to that of 18th and 19th century Picturesque tourists when confronted by the Sublime on a rocky mountain top. As Sebastian Smee has written: 'the best of Frank's varnish paintings capture, as effectively as any paintings I know, the way the mind reels, like an untethered astronaut, before the indifferent, stupendous beauty of the world.'²

1.   Dale Frank, quoted in Ashley Crawford, 'Dale Frank', Art and Australia, vol. 42 no. 2, Summer 2004, p. 207
2.  Sebastian Smee, 'Orange crush', Weekend Australian, 23-24 February 2008, p. 19