The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
The night of Michael Zavros's exhibition opening at Mori Gallery, the gallery walls reeked of fresh paint. Far from being off-putting, this olfactory prompt was highly appropriate for Zavros's Spring/Summer 'collection ', which is preoccupied with the compelling opacity of the surface. Spring/Summer was hung in the gallery's capacious main room and comprised thirty-one works, all oils on board which, with one exception, were miniatures depicting fragments of figures and interiors. The long walls appeared adorned with small icons, pointing to the wit of Zavros's play on the dynamics of desire and devotion, and to complex relationships of scale and the conventions of two dimensional representation that secure Orthodox icons from the idolatry of naturalism.
The subject of most of the paintings in Spring/Summer is the besuited male as he is represented in advertising. Particular markers of style locate Zavros's urban professional within an aesthetics and politics of the 1990s. This was the time when the term 'suit' entered popular parlance to denote the faceless professional worker; when male fashion championed the understated punctilio of European tailoring, as in the Armani suits worn by Prime Minister Paul Keating. lt was at this time, too, that the male body was reappraised as an object of advertising attention, in a move that recognised its market potential, to the urban gay consumer in particular.
In this connection, which is immediately, even emphatically apparent, Zavros's miniatures announce a position within painting's critique of the relation between photographic imagery and commodity fetishism, a focus which courts rather than denies the implications of its own practice in this economy. As stressed by the size of the paintings, which conform to that of the advertisements they 'copy', Zavros's