Matthys Gerber is a Dutch-Australian and/or Australian-Dutch painter. His recent works are framed by two questions. First, they operate within a postmodern problematic of internationalism (as opposed to, say, one of nihilism and hip despair). The Disney-shaped castle in "Matthys Gerber" suggests that now even the artist's birthplace, Europe, with all its myths and vampires, can't come here without a detour through the USA and transnational culture. But these paintings are not concerned with, for instance, whether Europe exists. What they are concerned with is how to deal with, how to acculturate what they can see of the world; in the flesh, on TV - wherever. It implies a refusal of the kinds of neat closures to which contemporary painting is sometimes heir; which refusal may explain apparent discontinuities among these works. If only because their meanings are decorated in words, allusive fragmentary phrases, these works front the dominant contemporary metaphor of looking as reading.
Your Wish is My Command: Spent Bullets.
The genie's and the dreamed-of Jeannie's teasing, quotidian catchphrase surrounds a cartouche squeezed into a vaginal shape, from which radiates a TV-white light threatening to crack the canvas in two. This emptying-out shape, the eye, is drawn back to a source, but of what? The djinni from which both genie and Jeannie derive is an oriental Muslim demon (hence the foreign curl of the lettering, "Your Wish Is My Command"). The djinni is less than an angel, and exerts a supernatural influence over humans. An Egyptologist (an orientalist) might have expected a cartouche, a scroll shaped ornament, to have enclosed royal and divine names and titles. But there is nothing in this cartouche - the first of
Matthys Gerber, Don't Spare the Rod, 1988. Photo: Jill Crossley. Courtesy Mori Gallery.
