Dr. Ashley Crawford, 2021
The Still Vague Vault
There is something a little bit frightening about Giles Alexander’s latest body of work. It’s the glowing luminosity of the surfaces, the sensual application of the paint, the shimmering, almost hallucinatory impact on the viewer…. It is also the scope of ideas, its embrace of both the inner and outer cosmos. As Alexander himself is fond of saying; “the more you know; the more you know you don’t know.” And in some ways that about sums up the explorations undertaken in The Still Vague Vault. Even his title carries a sense of impending mystery worthy of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe or Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
Alexander openly admits that in producing this body of work he “found it challenging getting the ideas to coalesce.” But that should hardly come as a surprise given that that those ideas seem to range from the cosmological to the architectural, from the scientific to the sublime and the spiritual. It’s almost as though Alexander has attempted a time capsule for the impending end of humanity – our attempts to capture knowledge – the vast library in Space for Reading, the search for our place in the cosmos in Galileo's crows nest, our tentative first steps onto the unknown terrain of the Moon in Baby Steps and our ever-going quest to find spiritual succour in churches and temples of all faiths.
Alexander, it would seem, is determined to investigate any and all aspects of what may be described as a ‘hyperobject.’ In his recent book Hyperobjects Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Timothy Morton coins the term ‘hyperobjects’ to describe events or systems that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on. In terms of grasping its reality it is as mind-warping as explaining a black hole (reference to ‘Re-presenting the unseeable again’?)– another ‘hyperobject.’ How else can we tackle the object depicted in Where the senses fail us, reason must step in? Is it a massive, mysterious planetary orb or a miniscule viral germ?
There is perhaps a grand irony in the fact that in this body of work Alexander has abandoned his usual painstaking and laborious oil painting technique in favour of the airbrush. The airbrush was of course popularised in Australian art by the master of the mundane Howard Arkley, whose favoured subject matter was the suburban home. It is nigh impossible to conceive of greater extremes in subject matter and approach as Alexander’s tackling of the sublime in subject matter and Arkley’s homely exteriors, and yet both artists mastered the technique to their own ends. “It’s the first body of work I’ve presented created using the airbrush alone,” Alexander notes. “The airbrush has been a real breath of fresh air for my practice… Feels like shaking off the distracting, weighty explicit details of my oil painting technique and in so doing rediscovering new room to paint. I love the way the information on the surface has a velvety hum on your eyes; teetering on the edge of concealment and disclosure as you interact with them at various distances.”
“The drawing-like playfulness of the airbrush has lightened the artistic load literally and metaphorically,” Alexander says. The technique has sat on the sidelines of Alexander’s practice for decades, but here facilitates a new focus that disrupts his slowly sought practice and narrative. This new particulate quintessence floats without effort atop a recognised career of laborious conceptual crafting. The cheekiest use of the airbrush comes with the fuzzy rendition – or “velvety hum” – of Alexander’s play on a Renaissance tableaux: The adoration of reason (After Giotto). The image shimmers and shimmies with an indistinct figurative narrative subsumed by the explosive and anarchic nature of sprayed pigment.
Everywhere we travel here we find sacred spaces. To be sure, Space for Reading may depict the Victorian State library, but the information within, with its sepia tinge and timeless architecture, gives it the air of the holy. Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts may be an auditorium (reference to the Melbourne Hebrew Congrigation Synagogue?) but the phosphorous, incandescent glow at its centre suggests a glimpse of an otherworldly entity. Galileo may have been an astronomer, but his residence depicted here in Galileo's crows nest, suggests the denizen of a monk or saint. Alexander can’t seem to help it – even wielding the mundane tool of the airbrush – everything he depicts rises into the realm of the sublime and the timeless. It is a rare skill and one to be cherished.