A Voice of Floating Silence
Coming close on the heels of Ian Friend’s survey exhibition ‘On Paper’ at Brisbane’s Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Art Museum, this show incorporated very recent work that demonstrated fresh developments within the metaphysical pictorial language for which the artist is known.1 While the survey covered some thirty years of activity, here at Andrew Baker’s gallery, a totally separate selection of Friend’s drawings/paintings on paper covered the period 2007-08 and also three large works dated 2002-07. The latter are titled A Thousand Leaves (Mille-Feuilles) #1, #2, #3. The time-lag inferred in these majestic works is characteristic of Friend’s refusal to be rushed or pressured into ‘finishing’ an image and his adherence to a palimpsest-like approach. As the artist says, ‘I’ve revisited these works over a period of five years; it’s the finishing touches that take a bit of time and contemplation. This is what happens when you spend a lot of time with the work and have it around you and it develops a history and a kind of facture’.2
The Mille-Feuilles (hung like a triptych) incorporate the white ovoid forms floating on washes of grey and washed out blacks that have characterised Friend’s numinous abstract statements for some years now. With their precise geometric presences painted in gouache, one over another, the ovoid forms slide past and over the top of each other within a shifting nuanced field. They accord with the actual process of making Friend’s distinctive art. This is because he first lays thick Arches sheets of paper on his studio floor and overcomes the challenge of their unmarked presence by covering areas of them with diluted monochromatic ink. Then, only after