Contemporary Portraits
In his book on portraiture, Richard Brilliant argues that the genre’s endurance and resilience is a reflection of the power of the relationship between subject, artist and beholder that characterises it. Attempts to unravel a persona and adequately capture the essence of a sitter have been a constant preoccupation of the artist since antiquity, and ‘Beyond Likeness: Contemporary Portraits’ at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, offers up some of the most recent efforts to do so, with an impressive range of over thirty painted, photographic, video and sculptural creations from across the globe.
Local Perth artist Frances Andrijich’s stunning photograph of a twenty year-old Heath Ledger stands out. It captures his significant charisma and magnetism, and thus prefigures his rise to fame, yet also, tragically, his untimely death, given the unbridled and explosive dynamism inferred in the work. Daniel Crooks’s Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement), a stunning work which depicts a lone man doing Tai Chi in a courtyard, is another highlight. The man’s graceful and choreographed movements are slowed down, emphasising the subtleties of his rhythmic motion, as time itself becomes the work’s medium, challenging the traditional modes of portraiture. Suddenly the figure begins to replicate itself and is stretched across the screen. The display is filled by body parts, each showing a different stage of the man’s routine. Still images travel across the monitor, before they bleed into one another and come alive as video. This fragmentation of the act of Tai Chi blurs the distinction between the still and moving image, but rather than obscuring our understanding of the subject, the many images we are presented with, which gradually stretch into one that fills