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During the 1990s the notion of grunge was hot and it was Sydney. Such artists as Hany Armanious, Mikala Dwyer and the early Adam Cullen managed to divide the art world like an overripe melon, splitting it down the middle between those who loathed their antics and those who admired their brazen anarchistic tactics.
It would seem that it is Melbourne’s turn to prod a stick at refinement with the emergence of a new generation of artists utilising materiality as an aesthetic weapon. Practitioners such as André Piguet, André Liew, Simon Pericich, Michael Georgetti and others have all caused a buzz in recent months for striking and innovative work that largely eschews traditional media.
Piguet and Liew, exhibiting in adjoining galleries at the independent artists’ space Bus, suggested that ‘grunge’ and ‘refinement’ were not necessarily conflicting terms.
Of the two, Piguet came the closest to being a ‘traditionalist’, although that is stretching the term indeed. Two large monochromatic orange ‘canvases’ dominated the space, painted with viscous intensity. At first viewing, Piguet’s work tends to be reminiscent of Dale Frank’s painterly abstractions, but that comparison fades quickly as one takes in the optical trickery Piguet utilises. Painted on slabs of iridescent foil, he allows hints of the glittering background material to peek through the surface, creating an optical depth suggestive of a veil of colour obscuring an alternate dimension.
But in a tactic that suggested that Piguet was desperate for some grunge credibility, the artist draped a bleached silk scarf over one of the painting’s corners, as though it had been simply discarded. The simple fact that the paintings were presented leaning against the walls, acting more as installations than one