2001: España, Cornelia von Wagenheim, Frankfurt, Germany
X Close
Robert Frost, the American poet observed walls, and thought deeply about them as he travelled the New England countryside. He contemplated the shape of walls, considered their purpose, and their need for repair. They became the subject of poetry.
This latest series of work is also mainly a study of walls – urban ones- and is equally the subject of art. The Artist, Matthew Bax is an Australian, born in Adelaide in 1974 and educated at St.Peter’s College and Flinders University, Adelaide. He has travelled widely in his youth to study the European collections in London, Paris, Florence, Assisi and Rome. Before commencing his University degree, he was awarded the State Art Prize in Adelaide and his earlier work is displayed in the South Australian Education Board. Bax began working and painting in Melbourne where he used images of Railway Stations and their environs because of the character and presence they held.
Further travels in Thailand, Canada, Greece, Turkey and Germany followed, increasing his desire to record details which the traveller with canvas and paint wishes to capture and recognise as ” foreign”. From this accumulated experience, the artist has drawn inspiration from urban life and the observation of the ordinary in his attempt to observe and identify beauty and intrigue in the objects of landscape. William Blake, artist and poet saw `all heaven and earth in a grain of sand’, and Bax in his recent travels in Spain, and working from sketches, notes and photos, created this small diptych of a kiosk sign “Agua Fria” advertising cold water – a valuable commodity in the Andalusian heat, as the artist was able to experience! Travelling to Madrid down to Granada, Nerja, Cordoba, Sevilla and Barcelona, his work on that journey was largely of wall studies showing contrasting colour schemes of yellow, blues and grey. But of greater interest is the way Bax has recreated the feel and smell of a wall with all that might have stained it over the course of it’s life. Here, the artist has used wine, coffee and muddy water from his brush to build up his image. Though the subject of the work is commonplace, the recreation of them is dramatic, as the artist adds layer upon layer to his canvas. Painted predominately with acrylic paint with impasto and glue binding mediums to give more texture, he adds dust, dirt and foreign objects before scratching and rubbing back the canvas to reveal the undercoat. In “Wall Studies- Granada” you see a rusted drain pipe on the wall, created by using blue on blue with a red rust strip of the canvas stuck to the main canvas. In “Rosa”, a mixed media on canvas Bax found in a little side street in Sevilla, a business name on a wooden sign hanging above the entrance to a store. They are canvas letters stuck to the surface. In the Prado, Albrecht Durer’s “Adam and Eve” has his trade-mark hanging from a branch of the apple tree, perhaps Bax in this work has created his recognisable sign. The phrase `action painting’ describes the vigorous attack by which some earlier artists like Hans Hartung and Jackson Pollock have attempted to exploit to the full the sensuous possibilities of their medium. To see the latest canvases of Matthew Bax is to see a vigorous and imaginative extension of that style. As with any artist who aspires to create something of worth, Bax subjects himself to daily and prolonged effort in his pursuit of satisfaction.
Alfred Stringer
April, 2001
Melbourne
