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| Fabricated
Rooms Howard Arkley Level 2, Art Gallery of New South Wales 9 November 1997 - 5 January 1998 Sydney |
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 Howard Arkley, Fabricated |
Howard Arkley's Fabricated
Rooms feel, in their pastal openness, completely
impersonal, like showrooms, or stills from some nasty
interior decorating magazine. In this suburban banality
they seem entirely comfortable with a social conformity
bred from complicity: This is what there is, and that's
why you want it. Like showrooms, it is as if these rooms
were designed for nothing to happen in them. But like
showrooms there is also something creepy here. The
apotheosis of suburban ubiquity in such monumental
painting indicates or suggests just this scary something;
some suburban neurosis about to splatter the walls with
blood. This eiry calm seems more than wishfull thinking
and less than fact. It is the paintings' dilerious or
pharmacodynamic aspect. It is what makes them wierd. Lets try and be more precise. This stillness is more than emptiness, as if these rooms contained a presence not from the outside as an intruder, but which was the very exterior quality of their own pregnant pause. An expectancy not waiting to be fulfilled, but which was the paintings very fullness, something not actual, but real nevertheless. A pure potentiality, a very suburban excess creating a reality no longer real or unreal but judged according to the flexible criteria of the hallucination. We don't know where it comes from, or what it's done. Has it happened or is it about to? It's hallucinatory and uncanny character is to escape determination, but to exist all the same. The imperitive of Arkley's paintings is to follow in the wake of their fluidity, to go trippin'. To see Fabricated Rooms in this way means stepping into them. We must examine the material construction of the paintings' clarity, to get a sense of their trippy dissolution. In Arkley's spray-painted line the very function of clear differentiation seems to dissolve. The lines bleed into surface when examined closely, the projected impact of the paint particles indexing the surface they hit. Their splash, their gradation of density out towards the airy haze of their limits seems to imply the merging of forms which does not deny differentiation, but avoids negation. It's as simple as not knowing where something really begins and where it ends. Fabricated Rooms has a clarity which includes movement. Not a movement from point to point, indeed the architecture of these rooms seems to confuse such a logical movement. Instead there is an aleatory movement to these rooms and furnishings generated by the blurred line. As a soft outline ã a softness made more palpable by colours complementary to what they describe ã the lines give an indistinctness to the space and its objects, as if they had been caught fading away or coming into being. These rooms, in their very clarity, only contain a blurred movement of something they cannot contain. All of a sudden these walls do not contain the inside away from the outside, but are the very topography of the outside itself. It is this uncanny flow, this untimely clarity of nondistinction which strikes us as the hallucination of fact. Stephen Zepke © The artist and |
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