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Smoking Guns
Sydney Morning Herald Saturday 7th December 2012
John McDonald
... John Walker, showing at the Tim Olsen Gallery, is not to be confused with John R. Walker, who recently had an impressive show of landscape paintings at Utopia Art. This John Walker is an Englishman who was formerly the head of the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne, and now lives and works in Boston.
His journeyman habits mean Walker has friends and colleagues all over the world, and many of his peers have welcomed this return to exhibiting in Australia. He has included six large oils in this show and more than 20 small pictures, many of them painted on old bingo cards. There is a rude energy in the large paintings, which are gestural abstractions with hints of landscape. Bright bands of red, yellow and blue have been laid over these landscape traces, as if an artist associated with De Stijl had tried to translate the original image into a geometric shorthand.
It doesn't quite work, but neither does it bomb. Walker's work has always been filled with allusions to other painters, but the resemblances are rarely spelt out. In paintings such as Red, Yellow & Blue Coastal X, we are never allowed to settle, either visually or intellectually. Some would argue these paintings aren't ''resolved'', but I'd say that is a reason to like them.