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Pathways to Other Worlds
Extract - The Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, Visual Arts 1st September 2007
John McDonald
Marie Hagerty and Vera Moller:
Tim Olsen Gallery, Woollahra, until September 8
The intensity that Tomescu cultivates is neither an option nor an ambition for many other painters. The two artists showing at the Tim Olsen Gallery take a much cooler approach. Marie Hagerty is a painter of elegant abstract canvases that embrace qualities of design Tomescu rejects out-of-hand. Hagerty’s palette is restricted to red, black and white but within those self-imposed boundaries she plays with shadows to create the illusion of three-dimensional forms. The planes in a typical painting such as Red Duette or Rival Method II seem to overlap like sculpted cut-outs. At best, this method has an ambiguity that keeps everything delicately balanced on the verge of some more precise recognition.
Hagerty’s paintings all feel like extreme close-ups. If one could pull back, motion-picture style, each work might be revealed as a detail of a larger scheme. Since that option is not available, the viewer has to take each canvas for what it is: a game with surfaces, where sensuous, billowing forms alternate with razor-sharp edges to tantalise the eye and the mind.
Hagerty’s co-exhibitor, Vera Moller, has trained in botanical science and theology and these studies inform the paintings and small sculpture in her show, Prototopia. Moller’s subjects are imaginary species of undersea plant life – mutant outcrops of the coral reef that are close enough to reality to seem plausible. She is attracted by the surreal aspects of these forms and her pictures have echoes of Yves Tanguy’s airy spaces in which blobs of protoplasm mimic both stones and living organisms.
Moller’s marine still-lifes are painted with the care of natural history illustrations although they are, in a way, no less abstract than Hagerty’s illusory cut-outs and shadows. With Moller we are able to form a clear idea of what we are looking at but that perception turns out to be pure science fiction. The narrowness of focus and the straight-faced attention to botanical detail are part of the process. This fantasia of the sea-bed is a very long way from Tomescu’s fields of fire. It is the difference between paintings that try to encompass the full spectrum of human experience and those that take a small subsection of nature as their focus. Whether we are looking at the microcosm or the macrocosm, abstraction and figuration, what all paintings have in common is that they seek to alert us to the possibility of other worlds, or at least to other ways of viewing the world.