Data-scapes
In July 2008 Jon Cattapan travelled to a number of Australian military bases in Timor–Leste (East Timor), through a project organised by the Australian Defence Force. His exhibition, ‘Viridian Eye’ held at Sutton Gallery (Melbourne) in 2010, originated from this series, and work exhibited in 2011 at Milani Gallery (Brisbane) and the more recently opened KalimanRawlins Gallery (Melbourne) continues to explore particular styles and themes that emerged from this military engagement. These exhibitions provide an opportunity to reflect on Cattapan’s distinctive style, its contemporary relevance, and the implications of the subtle developments evident in his recent work.
Formally, the paintings that Cattapan has exhibited over recent years are immediately recognisable as products of the ‘data-scape’ style that has dominated his artistic practice for almost twenty-years. In such paintings, Cattapan uses various rhetorical strategies to construct a painterly and abstracted evocation of the networks of communication and media that dominate our landscape. The paintings are dripping (sometimes literally) with markers of coded data and are filled with streams of dots, hazy graphs, and luminescent green lines that call to mind radar screens and early monochrome computer monitors. Phosphor-like, the paintings seem composed partly of streams of light, as though the landscapes depicted were draped in bundles of transparent optical fibres. The world presented here is one dominated by information networks.
Cattapan’s visual rhetoric also brings to mind technologies that form the pre-history of the datascape that they allude to, and his use of streams of dots is reminiscent of older machine-readable technologies. Indeed, their reference back to the technology of the punch-card is novelly inscribed into the material production of Chris McAuliffe’s insightful monograph on his work, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Jon Cattapan, Imagine a Raft: Father Son Reunion, 2012. Oil on linen, 195 x 168cm. Courtesy KalimanRawlins, Melbourne.
Jon Cattapan, Night Figures (Unloading), 2009. Oil on Belgian linen, 140 x 180cm. Courtesy the artist.
