Abstract Paintings
The impact of Dawes meticulously painted coloured grids is immediate, they draw us into their depths, enveloping us like large swathes of woven material. Dawes has achieved this effect with great material labour that is revealed in the microscopic precision with which the oil paint is worked into, and over-painted on, every square centimetre of even the large canvases. There is also a laborious logic at work in this show, a logic that insists on taking this materiality as its starting point, upon setting it to work against the symbolic order imposed by the geometry of the grid form. This materiality is indicated via a minute messiness, a bleeding of pure colour at the edges of the grid lines, a slight inconsistency in the harmonic colour gradations or in the rough texture where brush strokes cross. By assigning this gestural detail a determinant role in the work, the minute blob achieves a force in the context of the grid form that is experimentally comparable to the grand gestures of abstract expressionism.
The traditional grid form, symbolic of mastery through detachment, is curiously manipulated by Dawes to a contrary purpose: to render useless the separations we erect between the cerebral and the sensual, and between sight and touch. Dawes' paintings produce their effect by teasing the very perceptual impulses that perspectival grids stabilize when they mimic the optical projection of the human ocular field. Dawes uses everything at her disposal: light, shade, colour, repetition and rhythm to direct our attention simultaneously towards opposing poles of visual signification. Our gaze is caught, running between figure and ground, depth and surface, focal point and visual continuum. In one canvas for example, Dawes emphasises
Debra Dawes, Abstract Painting with Green Horizontal, 1988. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Mori Gallery, Sydney.
