The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
It is beyond the scope of a review to retrace the arguments of paintings' worth, and become argumentative, to unravel abstraction as if it were the only painted child of modernity, or to make the case for 'truth and beauty' over 'power and authority'. To state it simply, Brisbane artist RM Schuurmans-Medek (hereafter named RM, the artist's preferred designation), errs on the side of truthfulness. There is an elegiac quality to RM's paintings, unencumbered by overwrought devices or theoretical intrusions. Colour ventures no further than a tripart blue monochrome, Cobalt, Prussian Blue and Ultramarine (their scientific notations and historical developments are posted as evidence of external narrations). Each work has a structural element but does not follow a systemic or geometric determinism. Oil is the preferred medium because of its fluidity, chromatic depth and luminosity- it is not used merely to historicise. The project, titled 'Blueprint, from drawing to projection', is not a treatise on blue, to go where no blue has gone before, or an alternative to Yves Klein 's IKI Blue, but operates within the realm of possibilities of what painting is. To cite Jean-Francois Lyotard, painting ' ... demands that the visible be sacrificed so that ... human eyes (be granted) the grace of seeing what they do not see' .1
Far from being evasive, Lyotard's poeticism acknowledges the holy mysteries, that which is beyond the analytical probe. Likewise, there is no way to prove RM's objectives, 'to explore how some of our responses (to painting) could be framed as 'romantic' if contextualised in the language of art history. (How they could be described as 'erotic' if they were not)'. The same can be said of fiction