Juxtapoz Magazine – Ben Quilty’s Great Debate

Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to present The Debate, an exhibition of paintings by Australian painter Ben Quilty, on watch in Los Angeles through June 25, 2022. The new suite of will work continues the artist’s thematic evaluation of masculinity and violence in Western communities.

Based mostly on drawings of younger males training for a struggle, Quilty’s paintings incorporate surreal types established against bare, apocalyptic backdrops.  Just about every get the job done consists of a central figure who stands, sits, or falls in a shallow foreground.  Like actors on a phase, they command the compositions, presenting an abundance of electricity, motion, and color just before their out of doors backdrops, which resemble the harrowing vastness of sandy, unpopulated seashores or the desert.  The series of portraits commenced as the artist regarded as the violent riots on the shorelines of Sydney in 2005.  Following the riots, travel warnings were being introduced in international locations all around the globe, and Muslims were being specific relentlessly, inspired overtly by users of the governing administration and the media.  As Quilty explains, “blood on the beaches was a haunting reminder of the very first blood spilled on the exact same seashores when British ships first created contact with indigenous Australians two and a 50 % centuries in the past.”  

Quilty’s adult men are monstrous and misshapen.  Sure characteristics of their anatomies are blown out of proportion, these types of as the thumbs-up in The War Crime though others are misplaced, these kinds of as the foot emerging from an arm in The Senator.  These grotesque configurations are redolent of Francis Bacon’s cursed subjects, who contort violently, collapsing in on them selves and into the materiality of paint.  

It is not possible to cleave apart Quilty’s solution to written content and form in The Debate.  The figures disintegrate into formlessness, caught in rushes of violence. In The Diplomat, for instance, a cluster of thickly-used parallel lines in the proper margin of the painting implies ferocious movement.  Here, Quilty borrows a photographic mode of indexing movement: the blur captured by a camera’s shutter pace.  Just as the haziness of movement blur in a photograph emphasizes the materiality, alternatively than transparency, of the image, Quilty’s Guston-like impastoed paint emphasizes the mediation of his pictures and imparts a feeling of fleshiness to his surfaces.  

Colonization, violence, and masculinity have extended worried the artist, who joined the Australian Protection Pressure in 2011 as an formal war artist tasked with decoding the ordeals of Australian provider personnel.  And in 2016, Quilty traveled to Greece, Serbia, and Lebanon with Australian writer Richard Flanagan to deliver art that captured encounters of the refugee disaster.  He observed that the photos he took though dispatched did not sufficiently capture the sense of the ordeals, and thus turned to paint.  As the artist notes, “Men proceed to struggle every other.  Diplomacy is a dying art. Hacking, punching, spitting our way into the 21st century.”