Jon Cattapan, works and collaborations
I once spent a strange evening in a restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper in São Paulo, one of the largest and most dangerous cities in the world. Helicopters powered through the soupy sky and the lights of the city appeared to extend forever. There was a sense of serene unreality up there, suspended above the teeming mass of humanity below. I was reminded of the experience when looking at the paintings of Jon Cattapan in a survey exhibition held earlier this year at the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, The drowned world: Jon Cattapan, works and collaborations. Cattapan’s paintings are distinguished by their high vantage points, and space is denoted by the application of a grid and the geometric arrangement of lights. Most strikingly, they are imbued with a pervasive sense of anxiety.
Cattapan has been charting urban experience since his career began in the early 1980s. Ranging from his first neo-expressionist nightmares of nocturnal St Kilda to the recent meditations on migration, his work has a strong underlying humanism which has largely disregarded the vagaries of art-world fashion. The exhibition, curated by Chris McAuliffe, was part of the Potter’s ongoing commitment to mid-career artists, and like those before it, was accompanied by a useful and well-illustrated catalogue. It comprised eighty-two paintings and drawings, the latter grouped in a room above the two ground floor galleries which concentrated on the large canvases.
While Cattapan’s drawings are clearly sources of inspiration for his oils, most obviously in the early works, the more recent drawings have taken on a distinct life of their own. This is partly due to his practice of collaborating with other