Paintings by Arryn Snowball
In Arryn Snowball's Woolloongabba studio there is a small painting of great menace. A man in a boat floating on a lake swings an axe through the air while a duck bobs innocently in the foreground. The image is blurry, as though seen at a distance, and full of malice. Like most of Arryn Snowball's paintings, the image is drawn from a photograph, and in this case an image of European villagers breaking an ice covered lake to enable ducks to feed in the depths of a harsh winter. In a manner similar to that of Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, Snowball's handling of this original innocuous photograph transforms a sentimental moment and an act of benevolence into something quite other.
At the 2001 Venice Biennale, despite the plethora of film and new media work, the most interesting work featured in the Belgian pavilion, where Tuymans had assembled an exhibition of paintings characterised by an exquisitely light touch yet powerful political punch. His exhibition addressed the history of Belgian rule in the Congo and the murder of Patrice Lumumba. Tuymans is well known for his ambiguous, characteristically na'lve paintings that are quietly and surprisingly challenging. Indeed, he has often been credited with making painting relevant again. Tuymans offers painting a refuge in obscurity; most often his subjects are, if not inscrutable, then left unfinished, as though the entire exercise were an open-ended experiment. This is not to say however, that they are bereft of meaning.
Rather, Tuymans' oblique approach to subject matter is in part a strategy of obfuscation of meaning. Arryn Snowball's work also deals with representation and its ultimate obfuscation, but where Tuymans might look to Nazi Germany for