Gareth Sansom at NGV: the colourful chaos of our darker selves - Sebastian Smee
Gareth Sansom’s paintings are nasty. Look away from them and the suspicion grows that if you were to turn around without warning, you might be met by the demented eyes of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, or some bestial, hallucinatory figure squatting atop the painting’s surface — Goya’s Seated Giant, perhaps, or some equally obliterating monstrosity out of Hieronymus Bosch.
The fear is psychological. It is a response to Sansom’s subject matter, certainly. But since the subject matter is at first (and often enduringly) obscure, it is also a function of form: Sansom’s paintings so deftly juggle dissonant scales and registers that they constantly burst open their containers.
His pictures combine miniature graphic scuffles with diabolic enlargements, and muddy meanderings with drenching expanses of pure colour.
All this gives them the feel of dreams. Not of Salvador Dali’s or Max Ernst’s illustrations of dreams (“fake news” from the unconscious); more like dream work — enactments, in paint, of the mind’s frantic scrabbling and ceaseless unspooling; its loose threads, tangled knots and brisk switches between slack and taut, indolent and torpid, ecstatic and contemptuous.
He paints directly on primed canvases, without preparatory drawings, and his primary energies go into solving pictorial problems. “The best ones work,” he says, “when they’re on the brink of failure.”
The “nastiness” in Sansom’s work derives from the artist’s obvious feeling for — and bracing lack of sentimentality about — our darker natures; for the parts of us that idle along during the day, purring harmlessly beneath the surface of our charming, careful, mildly anxious social selves, but that intermittently growl, bark or stare inappropriately; that come out at night, and are liable to erupt in spasms of desire, violence and teeth-baring, and are tempted by self-annihilation.
“LAST NEW YEAR’S EVE HE STAYED UP ALONE … SNIFFING AMYL,” reads the text on the left panel of Sansom’s masterful 2005 triptych Sweeney Agonistes. Suicide, stupidity and isolation are all conjured by this work, which combines references to Sweeney Reed (the troubled son of Albert Tucker and Joy Hester, who was adopted by patrons John and Sunday Reed), TS Eliot, artist Francis Bacon, Bosch, chemical bliss and the world-altering agony of crucifixion. I believe it is the greatest Australian painting of the past 20 years.
If one were to try to account for the palpable step up in ambition and conviction in Sansom’s works since about 2000, one would have to attribute the advance in large part to his brilliant embrace of colour.
Sansom’s palette is so intense and strident that the mind wants to associate it with shop signs, billboards and graphic advertising rather than fine art.
Consider the blue ground of Academic or the orange of Beardsley (both 2014), two recent triumphs. The colours are not used commonly in such drenching quantities and at such high degrees of intensity.
Bacon, a long-term influence on Sansom (in ways that extend far beyond colour), may have provided a key precedent in this sense. In his great period, from about 1962 to 1976 (Sansom met him in London in 1967), Bacon contrived powerful contrasts between his blurred and bleeding figures and their bright, clean, geometric backgrounds, which he laid down in sumptuous colours that deliberately appeared commercial and arbitrary. The hues he favoured suggested purchased luxuries and plastic commodities — the whole artificial sphere that was, in Philip Larkin’s memorable phrase, “natureless in ecstasies”.
Although the palette of Sansom’s work of the past 15 years is different from Bacon’s, it is, like his, thrillingly artificial. “I’ve always hated the look of pictures that come out of an oil tube,” he has said, explaining his preference for sophisticated combinations of enamel, alkyd resin and oil. It is also lighter and brighter than Bacon’s (perhaps showing the influence of India: Sansom visited the old Pink City of Jaipur, among other places), and it is more active.
Where Bacon’s expanses of saturated colour remain as backgrounds, Sansom’s large, monochrome fields aggressively hem in the frenzied shapes they surround, flooding the field here, abruptly cutting out there or dissipating into drips and runs elsewhere. In this way Sansom complicates Bacon’s dramatisation of the tension between self and other, flesh and container. His pictures are less overtly theatrical and, in a sense, more lifelike.
Coloured squares and other geometric shapes stacked to resemble colour charts, or tweaked to suggest degrees of three-dimensionality, recur in many of Sansom’s recent compositions — including Daisy-chain (2016), Alchemy (2008-09), and the very recent (and brilliant) Wittgenstein’s Brush with Vorticism (2016). So do cartoonish outlines of distorted heads filled with abstract shapes and frenzied brushwork.
As often as not these complex and often quite hilarious mash-ups are surrounded by large expanses of bright, smooth, flat colour. Crosses, eyes, masks, drips and writing in various scripts also recur. Sometimes the writing is a quote or graffiti-like blurt, other times it is the work’s title: Pius IX, for instance, or Latex.
All this is plainly visible. What is harder to convey is the alloy, in Sansom’s best paintings, of impenetrable psychic goo and spastic body rushes of beauty. The isolated mind, they suggest, is a run-down, hunted, tatterdemalion thing; but coupled with the world — with imagination, chaos, colour — it can spawn wild, barefoot, cackling progeny. Look out!
The Australian August 29, 2017
Gareth Sansom: Transformer is at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, September 15, 2017 - January 28, 2018.
Gareth Sansom – Transformer: visual ambushes, black humour and naughty pleasures - Sasha Grishin - The Conversation
Gareth Sansom is a rare and an intimidating phenomenon in Australian art – an artist who thinks deeply, is fiercely independent, is visually literate and has mastery over an extensive range of skills.
His retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Gareth Sansom – Transformer is bold, provocative, exquisitely crafted – and simply brilliant. Sansom is an artist who takes no prisoners, breaks all of the rules and leaves you spellbound.
Sansom was born in 1939, the same year as George Baldessin and Brett Whiteley - a generation that took pleasure in risk taking and had little reverence for the conventions of the old order.
Like Baldessin and Whiteley, he too was besotted with Francis Bacon, explored the dark side of the human psyche, and was prepared to work across mediums, splicing and collaging images like the montages in film noir that so appealed to all three artists. However, unlike his two contemporaries, Sansom has been blessed with longevity and continues to work at the peak of his powers with some of the strongest, toughest and most uncompromising pieces amongst his most recent.
Sansom creates complex, multi-tiered narratives in his paintings, drawings and collages. There exists a seductive temptation to decipher the story and the artist willingly provides clues from his personal biography, art historical anecdotes and other lures and traps for the viewer. Many of these clues are brought together in the excellent accompanying catalogue edited by the exhibition’s curator, Simon Maidment.
In some ways, one can become engulfed in this semiotic quicksand, which is instantly gratifying in the same way as gossip may be an antidote to curiosity. We learn of the artist’s juvenile fantasies, obsessions and possible sources, but these are all largely beside the point.
Knowing that the cross-dressing Barry Humphries may have inspired the artist to do the same or that he used a room at home to stage and photograph a scene from the Bates Motel may satisfy some of our curiosity, but it adds little to the understanding of his work.
Sansom, for all of his transcultural references, is not, in the final analysis, a literary artist – an illustrator of verbal ideas – and for all of his reading and immersion in film and popular culture, his art is the triumph of visual intelligence. It speaks to us on a visual level that bypasses the verbal decoding. Like an alchemist, Sansom will mix a scene that can be traced back to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but he throws all of this into a creative cauldron in which image, text, difficult colours and, those painful to the eye, plus a mass of other unexpected, startling imagery is brought together to shock, surprise and delight.
Sansom has been doing this for 60 years and I have been viewing it for about 40 years and he has never failed to shock and surprise me. I have always thought that his work was good, but never realised it was this good. From those very early collages of the 1960s through to the monumental paintings of the last few years, there is an enormous consistency, emotional intensity and a generous dose of whimsy in his art.
Although we may have all now become somewhat resilient to being shocked through depictions of explicit sexuality, brutal violence, graffiti and the extreme manifestations of pop art, Sansom’s work can also seduce and emotionally disarm us before visually ambushing us.
This exhibition has about 130 such visual ambushes and intellectual naughty pleasures. From early show stoppers, including He sees himself (1964) and The blue masked transvestite (1964), through to much more recent pieces, such as Wittgenstein’s brush with Vorticism (2016) and Transformer (2016-17), they are all works that contain a fair amount of humour – often black humour. There is also a cringe factor at play, as if the artist has caught you in the act of enjoying his work and for this you must be humiliated.
For all of the notes of anarchy and praise of the temporary and the ephemeral, throughout the exhibition you also become conscious that you are looking at complex, sophisticated and well-structured works that are built to last.
Where does this exhibition place Gareth Sansom? Much of this work – particularly that from the past 20 years – would look good in any international company. Although not shy of the fact that it is made in Australia, the imagery is definitely not made for Australian eyes only or as an export commodity that is stamped “Made in Australia” for outside consumption.
Just as Anselm Kiefer bears the impact of his German origins and Jean-Michel Basquiat of his emergence within the New York punk scene, Sansom is a Melbourne product, but has a unique and unmistakable artistic voice. He can comfortably take his place as an internationally significant contemporary artist.
Gareth Sansom - Transformer, National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, Melbourne, 15 September 2017 – 28 January 2018
Gareth Sansom: Transformer, National Gallery of Victoria, 15 September 2017-28 January 2018 - by Rex Butler
The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Sebastian Smee barely got a word in during the Q & A held soon after the opening of Gareth Sansom’s retrospective at the NGV. Sansom, just about the ultimate alpha-male for all of his cross-dressing, entertained the audience with tales of his early cricketing prowess, his father returning home after the war without a limb, his encounters with the last of the Antipodeans and his ill-fated meeting with his artistic hero Francis Bacon while in London in the 1960s. But it was a story he told concerning his painting Sweeney Agonistes (2005), hung in the same room as the talk, that was perhaps the most revealing.
The work, a triptych, is an allusion, filtered through poetic precedent, to that ill-fated son of the Australian art world, Sweeney Reed, child of Joy Hester and Albert Tucker, adopted by John and Sunday Reed, who became for a while an art dealer before overdosing on pills in 1979. In Sansom’s depiction we have two darkly staring eyes, a cross and the letters INRI that Pontius Pilate inscribed over the head of the crucified Christ. All of this Sansom described to us on the night with pedagogic clarity. But the real revelation was his description of how he came to make the work. In fact, for all of its seeming indifference and cack-handedness, it took him a long time. For a good while, Sansom explained, he had only the central and right-hand-side panels, but after much reflection he decided they didn’t work. Then suddenly – undertaking it in the rather melodramatic words of the painting, “Last New Year’s Eve He Stayed Up Alone Sniffing Amyl” – he realised the answer was another panel to the left. It is only at this point that Sansom felt the painting was complete.
And it is intriguing to wonder why. The two panels of the centre and right “match”: the same darkly pink background, the same pale figure slouching towards the centre panel and then shown hanging up there on what we could take to be a cross on either side. It is the same perfectly standard anthropomorphism Sansom had been practising for some time by this stage of his career. But that was perhaps the trouble. What the painting needed – to put it simply – was a certain disruption or interruption, something to “come between” the two other panels. And this is to be found in that left-hand-side panel, which breaks with those other two: the restoration of the pink background against the blue and black of the centre panel, the introduction of a “witness” figure in the shape of the artist himself (the autobiographical confession of drug-taking, the scraping of the artist’s date of birth into the lower circle of brown paint).
The effect is that of a rupture, both with the materials and perhaps even the materiality of the two original panels, producing a kind of weightlessness or even ascension – fitting given the subject of the painting is a commemoration of Sweeney Reed – and it is this left-had panel, after all, that contains the words “stayed up” at the top right and Sansom’s admission that he painted it while “high” on drugs (although I’ll bet he didn’t have the original idea of adding it while on them).
In fact – although, at least consciously, he probably didn’t mean it this way – Sansom’s account of the work operates as something of a rebuttal of his interlocutor that night. For in the catalogue essay Smee contributes to the exhibition, consistent with his broadly aestheticist take on art, he concludes that what is at stake in Sansom’s work is a form of hard-earned beauty, that for all of its apparent chaos and confusion what Sansom seeks to bring about in the end is a resolved formal unity. In Smee’s words: “For all Sansom’s obsession with process, and his sensitivity to the demands of colour and form, his aesthetic decisions are really outcomes of an unconscious process of distillation and a search for coherence”.
And in this Smee follows a long line of Sansom critics, and perhaps even the artist himself in his own understanding of his work. After all, it is tempting to imagine that the true mastery of his method, the skill he has honed and wishes to demonstrate to his audience, is that of taking his work out to the edge of chaos before walking it back at the last moment through formal echoes, parallels and correspondences between apparently conflicting styles, colours and iconographies. It is undoubtedly what Sansom means when he says of his paintings: “The best ones work when they’re on the brink of failure”, and as we say this has been echoed by generations of commentators coming after him.
Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Curator Simon Maidment demonstrates his own skill in letting Sansom’s work out on a leash before reining it back in. Intelligently, he does not narrate Sansom’s work chronologically—which is always to say stylistically—but after laying down a few basics of biography and major influences (British Pop, Francis Bacon, Peter Blake) instead cuts across chronology, connecting works from wildly diverse moments in Sansom’s career. These are put together – in precisely a demonstration of the curator’s virtuosic eye – through the coincidence of such seemingly incidental features as the same small purple circles across or down the canvas – My Sin for Norman (1985) and A Forensic Possibility(2011) – or the same blast of yellow at its centre – Du haste keine chance (1981) and Friendship’s Road (1985-7).
It would serve as a testament not only to the consistency of Sansom’s use of certain formal elements (colour, iconography, style), but also to the discernment of the curator in seeing this. In both, there would be a “mastery”, both in seeing the order in apparent chaos and the chaos out of which order emerges. “The best ones work when they’re on the brink of failure” could be seen to apply at once to Sansom’s work and to the exhibition that curates it.
But let us think a little harder about Sansom’s foundational influence of Bacon, which is made so much of in the show and Sansom testified to so personally the night he spoke about his work. The exhibition begins as we walk in with Sansom’s One of Us Must Know (1966), which features the famous photo of the chubby-cheeked preternaturally youthful Bacon staring intently at the camera – and it is arguable that all of Sansom’s insertions of photos of himself into his works after this, whether straight or in stockings, are fundamentally to take Bacon’s place.
And undoubtedly such early works as He Sees Himself (1964) and Wee Ian (1967-8) feature attempts by Sansom to imitate that distinctive Bacon line and simultaneously scrappy and polished technique, with their marked-out rings or contours around which his figures circulate, bright monochrome backgrounds and unnatural paint colours (carmine red, manganese blue, cadmium green). And Sweeney Agonistes many years later is also a very Baconesque painting, not only in its iconography of the crucifixion, but – exactly insofar as this was a resource that Sansom knew he could draw on when he realised his previous pictorial solution had not worked – its triptych format.
Undoubtedly, the best account of Bacon’s work is by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In an extraordinarily ambitious claim, he argues that not only can we see the successive stages of human perception in Bacon’s work, but Bacon’s work explicitly allegorises these stages, is in a sense a reflection upon how we make sense of the world.
The first stage Deleuze describes as “contraction”, in which against the underlying chaos of the world, in which one moment disappears as soon as the next appears, we manage to hold two moments together to form a present. This can be seen for Deleuze in the formation of Bacon’s figures, which come about as the simple distinction between inside and outside. The second stage is “coupling”, in which we hold two of these moments together to form something like memory or the existence of the past in the present. Deleuze associates this with Bacon’s diptychs, in which we often have two figures being brought together, whether in love or violence. The third and final stage is not so easily explained and might be seen to be where art touches on philosophy. It is characterised by a “withdrawal” or “forced movement” away from “coupling” and towards a kind of virtuality in which perception would be free from the constraints of time and space. Deleuze associates it with the series of “attendants” or “witness” figures we have in Bacon’s triptychs, frequently looking on at two figures “coupling” across the other panels.
Deleuze’s was apparently the only explanation of his work that ever met with Bacon’s approval – it was in fact Bacon’s loathing of art speak that was the punchline of the anecdote Sansom told about him – and there is a famous story of the legendarily louche and dissolute Bacon inviting the apparently upright and prudish Deleuze to a meal at an upmarket French restaurant when he was in Paris one time and the two giants of 20th-century culture suddenly realising they had absolutely nothing to say to one another for all of their mutual admiration.
What has all of this to do with Sansom? If we go back to his anecdote concerning Sweeney Agonistes, it is to put an entirely different spin upon it. Sansom added that third panel to those other two not because they were too far apart but because they were too close. He wanted to put that third panel between them. And in fact the real aesthetic task for the artist – and the curator too – is not to come back from the “brink of failure” but to stay out there. It is to create a certain “withdrawal”, a certain virtuality or “nothing in common” to the various elements they assemble. It is to bring about something that is not there, an absence as well as a presence.
Take, for example, the lower right corner of Sansom’s meticulously worked A Universal Timeless Allegory (2014). At first there is a layer of orange enamel, then a layer of white, then on top of that a layer of yellow oil and then on top of that (although it is in fact the original background coming through) another layer of orange. As a result, the original orange appears as though split, divided, in a kind of Cubist “passage”, as though the same original layer had been painted on top of itself. And this is not even to begin to think about the subsequent enamel boxes of green, dark blue and grey, which tumble out and over each other ending all hope of reconstituting some original ground.
For all of Sansom’s self-mythologisation as a libidinal, sexed-up, cross-dressing libertine – all those photos of him in his undies, all those works with titles like Latex (2015) and Daisy Chain (2009), all the Instagram narcissism – in fact at bottom his works are coldly cerebral, meticulously constructed and fundamentally philosophical. And we need to invert the orthodox reading of his work: Sansom’s challenge is not to create a final style but to avoid falling into the mannerism of style. It is, as he keeps on adding different elements to his picture puzzles, not to find the one that will make sense of what is already there, but not to form a consistency, to keep all of his balls in the air at once.
But, astonishingly – except perhaps for a moment around the late ‘70s when a series of jet airplane vapour trails seemed to drag through the work – he has managed to keep his art afloat, weightless, refusing all possible taste and curation. The only contemporary Australian painter I’d suggest who matches him in rigour is Juan Davila, who from a linguistic or psychoanalytic point of view arrives at very similar conclusions. Look at the lower-middle right of Sansom’s Friendship’s Road II and you could almost be looking at Davila’s The Studio (1984): the same cacophony of signs, symbols and styles that seek above all to remain unreconciled.
Davila and Sansom: what a show! Separated by a generation, but both sharing the insight that the only proper task of painting is to “withdraw”.
Like all successful retrospectives, Gareth Sansom: Transformer ultimately left one wanting less. But thank God it ultimately made no sense, cast no definitive light on the artist. The work was able to withstand all attempts by the curator and catalogue writers to impose any meaning on it, for all of the thematic rooms and ingenious matches. As it stands, virtually no one – maybe not even the artist himself – has a clue what is going on in the work, but that is to be expected at this early moment of the reception of a properly powerful body of practice.
Rex Butler - Memo Review - 2017
GARETH SANSOM: TRANSFORMER JOHN McDONALD
Invited to nominate a masterpiece for a Radio National interview, Gareth Sansom decided to talk about Ingmar Bergman’s movie, The Seventh Seal (1957), which he first saw when he was 18 years old. Decades later he was still thinking about the film, making it the subject of large-scale paintings in 2007 and 2013. The Grim Reaper also has a cameo in Mr Art meets Mr God (2011).
At the age of 78 it may be entirely plausible that an artist should be reflecting on a story in which Death has a starring role. Yet, as always with Sansom, there are multiple motivations. The Seventh Seal is one of the most famous arthouse movies ever made. It was a demonstration that the cinema could transcend mere ‘entertainment’ and tackle the big existential themes with the same depth as works of literature or fine art.
Sansom is eager to associate himself with these big themes because his pictures are so cacophonous, so crammed with garish colour and riotous imagery that he wants us to know there is a serious core beneath the surface. He is hinting that the scrambled appearance of his paintings conceals a deeper engagement with life and mortality – if only we take the time to decode his visual puzzles.
Anybody wandering unprepared into the retrospective, Gareth Sansom: Transformer, at the National Gallery of Victoria, is likely to be overwhelmed by its sheer, crazed abundance. Part funhouse, part warehouse, the show is bursting with paintings, collages, photos, objects and memorabilia. There are veins of pure kitsch, grotesquerie, dark eroticism and a kind of giggling naughtiness. At first it seems grossly narcissistic but Sansom is constantly stepping outside himself and assessing every move. One layer is added to another until it’s hard to imagine a starting point. Maybe it all began with The Seventh Seal, which itself harks back to the Book of Revelations. It starts with silence and progresses onto thunder, lightning, earthquakes and the blaring of trumpets.
Gareth Sansom: Transformer
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,
15 September, 2017 – 28 January, 2018
Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December, 2017