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ROD BUNTER
Up Close and Personal
Holly Arden
Curator, Queensland Art Gallery
July 2005
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We’re all aware that when a magazine promises an "Up close and personal" exclusive, we’re never going to know what really happened between Brad and Jen. But we’re always tempted. Roderick Bunter’s paintings consistently trade in this language of desire, which relies on the fact that satisfaction can never quite – or only momentarily – be achieved by that which we crave, before the cycle begins again. Desire feeds commerce: advertising, fashion, TV, sex – the stuff of Bunter’s work, and its terms are easily applied to the business of art. In Bunter’s paintings, beautiful women meet our gaze promising gratification but, as in the slippery transaction of commerce, the closer we get to achieving this, the further we seem to have to go.
'Up close and personal' continues Bunter’s work with pin-up girls, which in recent times has included movie stars and other household names whose personal lives are all too familiar. There is something familiar about these new portraits too – the poses, the expressions, their first names repeated (Gail, Christine, Nicole…) but all are anonymous, faces fashioned in a photographic studio where Bunter worked with a photographer and stylist to get the shots for these paintings. These are faces that trade in their ability to present a façade. Faces that, upon close inspection, disperse into multitudes of tiny brush marks. Already once removed through the photographic process, there is, when you’re right up close, something airy, absent even. Ironically, it’s only when you stand back from them that they meet your eye.
It’s also at a certain distance from these slick objects that their impeccable craftsmanship is fully disclosed. What had at first appeared to be photographic works, mass-produced, now reveals sections of fine cross-hatching or intensely dark and delicately textured surfaces. Each takes days or weeks in front of the canvas, the artist investing himself, quite literally, through his time. Each title includes the number of hours spent on it, a personal record of the passing of the artist’s time. The logos that appear on each one record, quite randomly, Bunter’s day in the studio, where with the TV or radio constantly on he hears an incessant stream of airfare sales, car ads and talk shows. Could we be getting a little up close and personal here? Buying a bit of one-on-one with the artist? Even a one-off? Maybe, but Bunter’s logos quickly take us down again, reminding us that we may already have sold out to ubiquity with a promise of exclusivity. The market really is open to anyone, if the price is right.
Then again (and this is one of advertising’s more cunning nuances) many of these logos are exclusive. While they might be recognisable to most, their range of connotations isn’t always predictable. A harmless-looking Honda Red Wing logo in the corner of one painting reminds Bunter of an old ad campaign which urged
"get something red hot and throbbing between your legs". These subtleties of association recall that what you see is not necessarily what you get and perhaps you’re not, after all, in the in-crowd. Occupying the corners of each work the logos keep bringing us back to the surface, as if as a reminder that the faces looking out at us are somehow beyond reach.
There is something always just out of reach in Bunter’s paintings, or more precisely, always the feeling that he paints at a remove. His work highlights the numerous tensions inherent in consumption (art market included): the exclusive and the generic: the original and the multiple, façade and intimacy. Fully aware of his binding relationship to these, the most accurate picture he can paint is surely gleaned not up close and personal but from a distance. |
Further Information:
Helen Gory
03 95252808 0413123705
[email protected]
www.helengory.com
tues - sat 11am/6pm |
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