Prints
According to Sigmund Freud it is natural as well as to desire life to harbour a death wish. In fact, for Freud, an eternal struggle between Eros and Thanatos is at the core of all human activity. Rees, almost 92, is at an age when mortality is no longer something one ascribes to other people. And what is absolutely inspiring about his work of these twilight years is that he looks death squarely in the face and deals with it via his medium. Thanatos is simultaneously courted and gloriously struggled against in both a professional and a metaphysical sense.
For not only does Rees refuse to allow the burden of his reputation as most venerable patriarch of Australian art to deter him from exploring the possibilities of media new to him, but, even more amazingly, after a lifetime of figurative concern he is able to skirt courageously close to the precipice of figuration's total oblivion.
The tendency in some art movements towards the extinction of the image can be seen in Freudian terms as a displacement of the self-destructive drive. This would serve to explain how minimalist trends in art have resulted by the evolution of conceptual concerns to an ultimate reductio ad absurdum in the manner of Malevich's White on White.
Nonetheless, in Rees's later prints we see that it is just as possible to explore that other course, the perceptual-expressive road, towards such an end.
And, unlike some of the other "living national treasures" embalmed in The Queensland Art Gallery's recent Manton Prize exhibit, Rees neither reproduces a safe formula of past success nor shies away from the gravest issue of his long career.
Though failing eyesight