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There always appears to be something irredeemably butch about very large painting. Perhaps it's a dim societal memory of a time when men tackled Salon history paintings while women painters were generally limited to the more modest still-life or parlour portrait, but when we visualise the painter tackling a wall sized canvas or board-Pollock's grandiose action paintings, Kiefer's angst ridden reminders of historical record, Richter's huge nee-expressionistic explosions of colour- it's hard not to link the very large with the very male.
So it is intriguing to see this scale of work approached with self-reflexive humour and a lightness of touch, as it is in the latest body of work by Brisbane painter, Paul Wrigley. Wrigley has long established himself as an artist of remarkably diverse output. Each new phase in his development as a painter has ushered in an almost complete stylistic change. Wrigley's recent work exhibited at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art, at first seems to mirror this process and appears irredeemably diverse in style and content. This show, Monster, features a wall size colour chart grid on two board panels, an aerosol piece that sees the truck tag 'Gravedigger' sprayed directly on to the gallery wall, a digital video projection and a seductively photorealist canvas of a cheerleader based on a JPEG Wrigley found on the interne!.
Wrigley has stated that he seeks to represent the libidinal energy of a masculine code but, looking a little closer, one sees that it is the artist's own desires in regard to painting and the continual conflict between form and content which are on display. This realization makes sense of both the works themselves and the choice to exhibit them