surf paintings/futurist city
Paradise was once a Heavenly utopia. In Queensland, paradise is tourism's cliche. Recalling Gauguin, travel brochures present palm trees, beaches and blue skies. Once off the plane, however, the bleached high-rises and tacky tourist shopping arcades are less ideal. Surfers Paradise is such a sub-tropical 'paradise'. Stunning surf and long golden beaches front up to a hub of tawdry commerce. But this is paradise on earth for artist Scott Redford. Redford 's exhibition Surf Paintings/Futurist City is accompanied by a eulogy to the optimism of 1950s Surfers Paradise by architectural critic, Robin Boyd, who described it then as a 'fibro-cement paradise under a rainbow of plastic paint'. The new Surf Paintings skim the white caps of tomorrow, casting yesterday's utopian urban dreams in the hot fluoro-pink glow of a never-ending Tequila Sunrise. The seven Surf Paintings in the main gallery depict roughly brushed silhouettes of modernist architecture and high-rise apartment buildings. Palm trees are shorthand for surf-city summer holidays. They render it kitsch, the antithesis of the modernist ideal. Monochromatic fluorescent pink fields fend a push-pull between both campsmodernist form against surfer chic. The Surf Paintings are made like surfboards-in the next room there is even a custom-made surfboard. The paintings glow within their glassy surfaces, made of fiberglass over-painted foam. Fabrication is by Phantom Surfboards at Burleigh Heads, the Gold Coast. Alonzo Punker translates Redford's designs; Chris Garret! applies the mirror coat. All the paintings bear the Phantom logo Almost as an in-joke, there is a homage to lan Burn's Blue Reflex works of 1966-67. Surf Painting/The Reflex is a portrait-orientated hot-pink monochrome devoid of image, save the Phantom logo. As in Burn's Blue Reflex and his Mirror Pieces