Stewart MacFarlane: Private Life
By no means is Stewart MacFarlane’s exhibition ‘Private Life’ a timid entrée for Malaysian audiences. Apart from a single cityscape, his thirty-one paintings are nudes that carry the punch expected of MacFarlane’s lurid palette and confrontational poses. Rarely is such intensity seen in Malaysia. These works blatantly challenge Malaysia’s censorship protocols, which even preclude life drawing at art schools. The exhibition was not an intentional political statement by MacFarlane but rather a bold invitation by dealer Lim Wei-ling of Weiling Gallery who met MacFarlane when studying in Australia in the late 1980s.
For a follower of MacFarlane’s work, there are no surprises in these paintings. They are cohesive, mature and embody his strident individuality. The surprise is their place within the Malaysian context, presenting an alternate reading of his urban nudes against the background of an Islamic society. Here there is no kampung nationalism which is favoured in Malaysian painting; gone is the delicacy of ‘sensitivity censorship’, replaced by an unequivocal confidence that owes no debt to borrowed style. MacFarlane’s paintings are sensually loaded with ambiguous invitations and the psychosocial state of the modern western city. Take Upstairs and Purple Stockings’ for example; in the context of Malaysia the sexually confrontational quality of these works takes on a complex political and theological position, which becomes part of their charge.
It is usual in Malaysia for a painting to have ‘a story’ as a kind of entry point and it is through this portal that MacFarlane connects with his Malaysian audience. His paintings ‘filmic’ quality, employing devices of staging, props, harsh lighting and the camera’s gaze, invite an objective scrutiny. These are not homely girls bathed in a Rubenesqe