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Andrew Arnaoutopoulos’s studio practice and exhibition history is as expressive as it is varied. His work includes painting, objects, installation and video.1 He is an artist concerned with the layers of history and culture that come to bear on us collectively and as individuals. Arnaoutopoulos is something of a non-conformist—although not an artist-ideologue or iconoclast—yet the engagement of painting with its attendant history and legacies rests at the core of his practice. This article examines an exhibition mounted at Bellas Gallery, Brisbane, in February 2003, and picks up the trail in a view back over the past twenty years.
Arnaoutopoulos has remained true and faithful to a particular vision and interest—a fascination with the distress, weathering and incidental markings of industrial surfaces. He has worked as a graphic designer in the printing industry where surface splatter accumulation is part of the workplace environment and ‘landscape’. Steel surfaces have been of particular interest to him. Steel is the raw stuff of the industrial age, manufactured, processed, and then transformed by need and ingenuity.2 At the intermediary stage—as it ‘waits’ before it is made into something else—steel is a natural element and thing, acted upon by other elements (nature) that generate pattern, colour, and composition. The latter aspects have been the grist of non-objective painting for nearly a century.3 If the viewer/pundit, is predisposed to newness as the unrelenting march for the sake of change, there was nothing new in Arnaoutopoulos’s 2003 exhibition. In one significant aspect, however, the artist purposely excluded the obvious signs and markings of human intervention and product logos that have appeared in his earlier work, and that can be read for their anecdotal information... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline