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Death or Glory: The Rococo Rebellion of Adrienne Gaha
Paper Runway 17 Feb 2012
Anna Johnson
The Australian artist Adrienne Gaha has lived in Europe since 1993. This past summer she returned to Sydney for a solo show, a painting stint at a small studio with the National Art School and screen printing workshop in Melbourne after a fairly long hiatus from exhibiting. She took a seven-year break from painting to concentrate on her family, and in that time absorbed herself in drawing and exploring the more obscure small museums of Paris and London. Currently working between London and a rambling studio near Toulouse in France, Gaha abandoned the themes of her earlier painting: “the female body and the erotic, traipsing instead across irreverent spans of art history, with an ironic nod to Antipodean nostalgia and a pop crush on rococo painting. Her recent screen prints are a strange conflation of Australian illustrated book icons, French salon frippery and blatantly sexy post punk graphic flair. My first impression of looking at a room full of them was that I was devouring marzipan fruits from Laduree while listening to the Clash full blast. Pretty delicious.
Dusted with a perfumed palette of fondant pastels and a sequence haze of silvers and burnished golds the works have a quality of a stage art, a magnified erotic etching or some remnant of faded finery hung up to the light in tatters. Of course they invite a closer look, upon investigation each yields a trace of dark humour: Blurry footballers, Banksia men that look oddly like pornography, Kewpie dolls and nymphs; the obvious grain of tabloid pages forged with children’s book classic that resemble rain-damaged dreams; and all of these strands often compressed within the same image. Unlike her paintings, Gaha’s works on paper have no glaze to melt beneath. Their opacity dwells on the immediate sensations of a shallow surface where every colour and every cultural reference demands the same level of focus. Imagine three TV channels broadcast on the same screen, cast under a veil of rotting upholstery fabric and you get the drill.
The artist’s rationale for re-animating (and possibility perverting) the images we “know and love” was a personal one. All her memories of growing up in Australia in the country is that you receive everything by book,” Gaha reflects. “I loved and cherished my books and I lived through them whether they were children’s bush fables or art books. My grandmother was a Eurocentric artist; as a result I have always used the contradictions between Australian and European imagery. I made a conscious decision in these works to use the images I had carried with me for years in a very subjective way. Perhaps because I have the distance of living in Europe, it makes me more experimental and less involved in Australian issues of identity.
Her subjects can be cutting but they are rarely earnest. So, while on first glance her large prints might evoke the political and band posters of the 1970’s and early 1980’s of the infamous Tin Shed’s era, their execution is far more sophisticated, detached and deliberately disturbed. Pulsing at the heart of each one is this persistent question of good taste: a Beano cartoon on a Boucher mural, a Pre-Raphaelite angel on a race riot at Cronulla Beach, heavy metal skulls and Hollywood Regency cats. Layered into those ironies are the source materials themselves of her two main influences- the 1760s and the 1960s. Nicholas Boucher, the master of painting cupids and Royal mistresses, was reviled by centuries of art critics as being the embodiment of expensive kitsch and poor taste. Pop artists such as Richard Hamilton and later Andy Warhol asked themselves precisely where the boundary of taste existed in the modern: could a body builder or an electric chair be to crass? Gaha’s work seems to reinvent and resurrect good taste on purpose (decorous colours, velvet textures and an open use of whimsy) because clearly those boundaries no longer exist to be violated. Her experience of living in Europe has been one of a perpetual parallel between “tragedy and frivolity”: high art and low ethics, fashion and famine, Gucci WAG boots and the GFC. And so her work is exactly like the experience of tripping out of a decadent exquisite private collection flat bang into a tabloid newsstand, except that the experience is embedded within the memory of one image. Each image more lush and aesthetic than the last. “I admit that I am engaged with beauty”, she reveals. “Sometimes I think I am sacrificing something that is interesting because it is not beautiful enough. Perhaps this is a French influence: because Europeans have less nature in their lives they make a sacred place for beauty.”
Only taking up silk screening four years ago, her experiments with the medium forged a link between Gaha’s love for old books and her love of paper. “When you do printmaking it’s interesting to see just what paper can take,” she says. In the case of these prints, colours that ought to be impossibly fuse with a silked ease under each frenetic layer and somehow the colour makes the layering of highly incongruent images not just possible but poetic. The physical pleasure she found in these works came, to some degree, in the unpredictable outcomes of each drag of the screen. “The idea of silk screening is that you have that sheer ink over white and it gives you that ‘glow’,” Gaha explains. “The colour can be really intense and its hard to engage primaries. The method is a very direct medium, it has immediacy and they are fresher perhaps because of it. Putting something together created enmeshed meanings and, unlike the paintings, I don’t have as much technical control over them. Printmaking is also a good break from the solitude of studio work. It is a collaboration with other people and there are constraints on your time. I think the other appealing aspect of works on paper is that they are accessible and they have their own intimacy. I think I am more adventurous on paper. Materially it is not such an investment because (sometimes in oils and other media) the more beautiful the object you are making, the more intimidating it becomes.”
Happily the work she makes is driven by beauty but not silenced by it. This is not the bland bowl of sugarplums perfected by Boucher or the caustic shallow grave dug by Warhol’s sheerest screen print icons.
Returning to Europe flooded with what she describes as the “rage of vegetation” growing up through the streets of Sydney, Gaha takes back the alien light, the hum of nature and the continual contrast of two hemispheres, polished by art history, submerged in impossible colour, numbered by materialism, ripped off by rock n roll.