Future Constellations
On a sunny Queensland day, clerestory light cascades into Milani Gallery. A soft luminance is cast over Jon Cattapan’s seven paintings, one hanging on each wall. Four large paintings hang in the lower gallery and three mid-sized paintings hang in the upper mezzanine gallery. The light furrows into the layers of paint where dripped backgrounds are overlaid with painted sketch-like markings of spectral figures in strange landscapes. As the light works its revelatory illumination, each painting becomes a portal to new or other worlds, and the exhibition’s title Future Constellations seems like an invitation to time travel.
This invitation is expressed through Cattapan’s subject matter, and the way he uses paint. His backgrounds are created with bold gestural strokes using broad brushes laden with liquid paint. This paint is allowed to drip, darker colours cutting into lighter colours and vice versa, tracking vertical trajectories that seek out the bottom edges of a painting. The dripped paint is visceral-like, and our innards resonate with its impulse to leak, drip, expel, flush, travel. Significantly, Cattapan allowed background paint to drip after his return from Timor Leste, where he was deployed in 2008 as Australia’s 63rd official war artist. His subsequent experimentation with dripped paint reflects a visceral reaction to a realisation that in the 21st century, ‘We’re in a state of perpetual motion where conflict is always there—hovering’.1 The dripped paint, reflecting motional forces, acts as an invitation, one with multiple possibilities. Does it offer an escape route to other places or times? Or, does it offer a way to gain perspective from outside the painting, or does it suggest loss, a bleed-out, a slow disappearance?
The invitation to time travel