Andrew Antoniou
' Artist Profile, '
February 2019
Maitland Regional Gallery
Andrew Antoniou is an artist and teacher whose drawing practice examines the theatrical incongruities, and ambiguities, of human experience.
Antoniou’s fascination with the theatre has been a life-long affair. Since first engaging with the pantomime tradition as a child, an interest in the ways in which we organise and give ritual meaning to or lives through stagecraft and storytelling has occupied the artist’s thoughts, and shaped his artistic practice.
MRAG’s exhibition conceives of the stage as a space separate to, and yet intrinsically reflective of, our everyday lives — our quotidian dreams and desires. Allowing us to see ourselves as from above, observing the tragedies, comedies, and mysteries of our lives, the visual vocabulary of the theatre — replete with open-ended symbols, tropes, and motifs taken uncannily out of context — gives us a scaffold around which to understand our lives and our conditions. What it doesn’t give us, this show proposes, is any fleshing-out of this scaffold, any sense of certainty or satisfactorily complete answers.
Props (2017), for instance, shows in bright colour some recognisable characters and tropes of the theatre. A man holds a skull: poor Yorrick! Populating the scene are a plethora of objects which gesture toward ideas bigger, but less exact, than themselves. A ladder crosses over the centre of the picture — leading where, and why? A rope dangles in the air; a bell punctuates the scene. We sense that these ritual objects are overdetermined with symbolic resonances, spinning out from their sources in all directions. It’s the combination of breezy recognisability and ineffable ambiguity in this picture that seems to be much of Antoniou’s point. Inspired by Absurdist theatre, he aims to eliminate logical modes of explanation from his picturing of the world, capturing the human condition without explaining it.
Antoniou cites Goya and Max Beckmann as formal influences. Bouncing off their engagement with the grotesque, and their use of deep shadow to dramatise narrative events, the artist’s work bears the visual and conceptual traces of these predecessors’ work. Beckmann’s drawn portraits, especially, feel present here. The choice of drawing as a medium through which to engage ideas of theatrical mystery and mortality certainly gains coherence through a consideration of these source materials. The scratching of the pencil against the paper might take on a troubled emotional valence in this context, just as the brightness of the colour pencils takes on, in light of Goya and Beckmann, an ironically unsettling feeling.
The gentle art-historical — and theatrical-historical — references that Antoniou’s pieces gesture toward hint at the artist’s background in teaching, and at his approach to creating artworks. ‘The business of inspiration of a bit overrated,’ he says, ‘it is a job after all coming into the studio.’ The MRAG’s show gives us an artist embedded in both an exploration of the tropes of visual and theatrical art, and an investigation of the human condition.
Canberra Times ,
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Divining Rite. oil /canvas 2020
Observations etching 2017
Motherland oil / canvas 2022
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Andrew Antoniou: Props, masks and magic, Grainger Gallery, Building 3.3, 1 Dairy Rd, Fyshwick. Andrew Antoniou is an artist with a vision, one that is distinctly his own. It is built around the idea that the world is a stage and on this stage characters, who are devoid of personal emotion, perform an enigmatic narrative. Their actions appear to be deliberate, but their purpose is not revealed to the viewer, nor is it clear the role played by the various props, symbols or rites that surround and seem to preoccupy these characters. One large oil painting in this exhibition, Divining Rite, 2021, brings together a cast of five characters totally absorbed in their action collectively devoid of a common purpose. A top-hatted gentleman holds a divining rod, another examines a diagram with a telescope, a woman casts bones in an act of scapulimancy, a man wearing a paper crown is preoccupied with lithomancy, while a lad wearing what appears to be a school tie holds a giant cup and spoon oblivious of the fact that his tie seems to be caught in the cup. Playing cards, dice, a star and a feather drift in the air and a black bird flies into the scene bearing a message in its beak. The stage props are strange and include endless steps, door handles, weeping drain pipes and grand facades in the background that appear like a painted backdrop. Antoniou provides us with this myriad of specific clues, but the overall narrative remains elusive. Are we witnessing the folly of humanity with its belief in divination and participating in the theatre of the absurd? Is there a profound ritual taking place that we are being invited to decipher? Antoniou is a superb draughtsman and manages to handle his 'tumbling out of the picture' composition with a mastery that would be beyond the ability of many artists. Possibly the finest work in this exhibition is the large virtuoso charcoal drawing Zodiac Dance, 2019. A heightened sense of anxiety appears to have gripped the signs of the zodiac that have been whirled into some sort of ritualistic dance of death in this intensely packed, slightly claustrophobic composition. It is a drawing where the eye is unable to rest on a single spot and we are endlessly intrigued by the wit of invention. The repetition of naked light bulbs adds a disturbing note to this pictorial nightmare. Antoniou is also a distinguished printmaker - an accomplished etcher - with a number of superb etchings included in this exhibition, amongst which is Observations, 2017. Here the pantomime with its cast of somnambulistic characters and their weird attributes makes for a disturbing composition that seems to stem directly out of the world of Hieronymus Bosch and the medieval world of the absurd and the grotesque. One is tempted to say that Antoniou makes the sort of work that it would be advisable for children not to view before they go to bed. As an artist, Antoniou has been a slow burner in the Australian art scene, someone working on the edges of the art world, scoring a few drawing prizes and bought by a few institutional art collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Ashmolean in Oxford. Exhibitions such as this one and recent shows at the Australian Galleries demand that he be taken seriously as a significant figurative artist who with his with his theatre of life, dreams and nightmares has developed a unique voice within Australian art. |
