This show is the latest in a series of surveys, organised by the Goddard de Fiddes gallery, to showcase Western Australian artists under the loose banner of 'geometric abstraction'. The artists included in the current exhibition represent three generations: emerging (Emma Langridge, Carey Merten, Cathy Blanchflower and Daniel Argyle), mid-career (Trevor Richards, Michelle Sharpe, Jurek Wybraniec, Andrew Leslie and Mark Grey Smith) and 'senior' (Giles Hohnen, Judy Chambers, Miriam Stannage and Trevor Vickers).
The exhibition's rationale is based on the notion that a distinctive local school of geometric abstraction has been developing in the West since the early sixties. According to the gallery's press release, what distinguishes this local school is a penchant for the 'high key' colours that characterises the local environment. But this reference to the 'bright light' of the Western skies as an influence for painters is in, many ways, a cliché. Local critics and art historians employ it every time they want to argue for the 'regional distinctiveness' of this or that aspects of Western Australian painting. Of course the 'bright light' notion is not totally groundless.The problem is that, as is often the case with clichés, a small truth is gained at the expense of larger ones which the cliché distorts and obscures. In this case, the 'bright light' concept is based on a kind of reductive naturalist determinism that overlooks the import of complex - and more elusive - patterns of cultural influence and transmission.
It is also doubtful whether there really exists in Western Australia an uninterrupted lineage of abstract painting spanning forty years. Arguably, it was not until the early nineties that a clearly recognisable and distinctive trend of this kind started