Alexandra Sasse’s art reviews have been published in Trouble and Jackdaw magazines. These are reproduced here along with more general art topics and musings.
What would make you drop everything? Last month I booked a ticket on Saturday and got on a 23 hour flight on Tuesday in a rush to see the MADRID REALIST exhibition in Spain. How uncommon to see contemporary paintings that are unafraid of either beauty or realism.
The skies are overcast in palest purple with a lemon horizon as I drive down Studley Park Rd towards Abbotsford.
It’s after lunch and the light is in the western half of the sky, but low on the horizon shooting a warm yellow haze over the suburbs. There’s a long low shape of a warehouse painted in orange which sets off perfectly the blue distance of the city beyond. It’s May and the air is brisk, crisp, making you move more quickly but not yet to the sudden-intake-of-breath cold we will get to in July.
Contemporary realism: not all that glistens is gold. If you can’t spot the difference between Thomas Kinkade and any of the Spanish painters… you might as well live at McDonalds and start a swap card collection… Alexandra Sasse https://vimeo.com/153757287 Realism has always been big in Spain, although like most of the contemporary art world there …
It’s much more likely it was a real life event not an art gallery visit that did it. Real life is far more shocking than any art I have ever seen. A ‘twin towers’ moment, a sudden bereavement, a crime close to home, these are shocking. People hold their cheeks, cover their mouths, are silent or scream. I have never seen that happen in an art gallery.
In an art gallery what emotions are you likely to experience? Perhaps you have been disgusted, or provoked, delighted or absorbed.
It’s a handle applied to artworks to make them easier to deal with, a simple shortcut to appraising a work : good – has social impact, bad – no social impact. But social impact and social comment are not the same, and they are both independent of quality. While it may be reasonable to say that one of the roles of art is that it has a social impact, (as all artworks reflect and comment on the culture from which they arise) to judge a work by social impact is a nonsense, as it is most likely neither evident nor quantifiable. Yet this a key curatorial practice in contemporary art and a measuring stick of many a selection committee who are bullied by funding bodies into making exhorbitant claims about the utility of their exhibitions.
I am in the final stages of a landscape painting which will be called A Quiet Day in Northcote. Perhaps Arthur Boyd was right when he said …all Australian paintings are in some way a homage to Tom Roberts … as Roberts’ own work A QUIET DAY ON DAREBIN CREEK, has been much in my mind as I worked on this picture.