Mark Galea: turning things around
Mark Galea likes to play with our eyes and our minds. In 2001 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art he rotated the interior of a gallery room ninety degrees in an installation entitled Model. With the gallery architecture turned on its side you walked on a wall and could look directly at the lights, floorboards and security camera. Reconfiguring a three-dimensional space was an ingenious way of making literal a key conceptual and visual concern in Galea’s two dimensional paintings and works on paper: permutations in colour and form make visual the idea of rotation or movement in space, of perceptually turning things around and rhythmically shifting them about. For this exhibition he continues to elaborate on these ideas through a hybrid combination of abstract geometric painting and sculpture.
In his paintings Galea not only teases our eyes but he also delights in the potential of the square and the capacity to generate meaning. The exhibition’s principal colour is red. With associations of life, death, power and love this is a colour capable of both great metaphysical symbolism and simple connotation. It is a colour that can suggest change and transformation. In Galea’s careful and disciplined application of monochromatic paints, abstract forms optically quiver and vibrate. Our eyes participate in this rhythm, which is produced by contrasting harmonious and discordant colours within the composition, despite the essential silence of the painting as a material object. Even though the movement within the work is illusory, it demonstrates that there is a twist to Galea’s fascination with geometric perfection. And it is this twist – an unresolved tension between movement and stillness, visual structure and imbalance – that further describes his approach to art-making.
Tolerating heat, yet resenting disturbance illustrates these relationships. Here is a series of nine individual wooden panels painted with layers of red, pink and black are arranged into a single large square. Bright blocks are offset against darker blocks of colour creating an imagined movement within the pictorial plane. It is a chequerboard effect, formed by rotating colour grids, that is based on conceptual and visual opposites.
The same sensations and ideas are played out is Galea’s three-dimensional painted plastic sculptures. In the hanging mobile sculpture Understanding the meaning of new dance steps, squares of bright reds and pinks are painted onto two-dimensional Perspex panels of different sizes arranged in a vertical format. Hung from the ceiling the sculpture appears to float, reflecting coloured light and transparent areas. Similar ambience is generated by On the verge of understanding new dance steps made up of red, pink and orange squares painted onto Perspex panels that lean upright on a ledge. Characteristically, this title references the compositional elements of the work – acting in this instance as an introductory gesture to its companion piece Understanding the meaning of new dance steps. The transition in title and form from one work to the other acknowledges the material basis of Galea’s ideas, while adding a “real life” dimension to his work. These elegant objects make his preoccupations clear because the notion of rotation and movement is explicit, made concrete in form.
Galea’s practice clearly responds to and references the history of abstraction. Piet Mondrian, for instance, reduced his paintings to straight lines and pure colour in order to achieve a harmonious and rhythmic synthesis of form, colour and surface. Barnett Newman believed you should stand a certain distance from the canvas and discover yourself within his work. From an illusory surface that suggests energy through the relationship between positive and negative elements (Mondrian) or encourages self-reflection (Newman) to contemporary ideas of interactivity and spatiality, Galea explores the antecedents, leading universality to the ideas and sensations opened up by abstraction.
In their refined amalgamation of structure with content, Galea’s paintings are similar to a well-crafted symphony; they belie their strategic and methodical beginnings. They can be quiet and uplifting or vibrantly dynamic, strong and diminished. There are bright colourful moments and simultaneous subtle shifts in tonal variation. In a beautiful synthesis of form and process they ask us to participate, showing us the spaces just beyond the square.
Natasha Bullock
Catalogue essay for Mark Galea - Recent Works, Charles Nodrum Gallery, 2005
Perceptual motion, abstraction and the art of Mark Galea
The cell of the secret is white …
It is stronger than all geometry. It is part of the cell of intimacy.
Gaston Bachelard
The evolution of geometric form and everyday sculptural objects contributes to multiple readings of Mark Galea’s abstract artwork. His work explores and responds to the history of abstraction, in particular the work of modernists such as Barnet Newman and Piet Mondrian, where the representation of space, depth and movement also provide an expressive personalised ‘space’ for the viewer’s contemplation. Headparts (1999) illustrates these enigmatic and ambiguous relationships. In this work three painted colours are layered on a series of sixteen plywood boards. The engaging visual outcome obscures the formal, mathematical manner in which the work has been conceived. The result is a variously coloured display of squares and rectangles; the panels rearranged as the viewer wishes. In this way the work engages the viewer perceptually and physically through the possible choice and movement of each panel. And each composition implies this energy or motion in its arrangement; as an optical tension oscillating between simplicity and complexity, motion and stillness, surface and depth. Likewise, in Do It Yourself (1997) painted Perspex panels are assembled – as the title suggests – in numerous colour combinations producing a multitude of associations. Energy and calm are connected by colour, composition and structure in the resonating tension between stagnant blocked forms and their changing capacity for depth and illusion in other combinations.
While appearing dramatically different, the large-scale paintings, Sightings (1999) and Evidence (1998) render the same ambiguous sense of space. These paintings are based on automobile parts and consumables (food) placed in the middle of monochrome fields; the edges of figure and ground uncertain. In this way everyday objects are re-invented and given a renewed presence. The biomorphic nature of the white masses positioned within each composition seems to problematise their everyday beginnings. Not unlike the geometric patterning and profundity of Do It Yourself, these works are suspended somewhere between agitated perceptual quandaries and the tranquil resolution of abstract forms. The edge of each hovering form bleeds into a surrounding impenetrable darkness that is pulsating yet, strangely still. Another constellation or universe (as the title seems to imply)? A transcendental spiritual ‘space’?
The transmutable nature of space, depth and perceptual motion is most explicitly explored in the most recent work for ACCA, Model. Gallery 2 has been rotated ninety degrees, effectively turning the gallery on its side. Similar to Sightings and Evidence, Galea has taken a ‘found’ object, this time a gallery space, and reworked it, imbuing it with a renewed spatial sensibility. Yet, in this instance the binary oppositions he explores are all the more palpable as the viewer is physically positioned in the remodelled gallery space, creating a complex dialogue between spatiality and the body. There is a stillness to the plain white walls and floorboards of this piece; however, motion – a tangible energy, even – is clearly implied in the rotation of the architecture which describes a smooth arc or curve through space.
Perhaps the most striking antecedent to Model is a work from 1993 called Altered Sight in which a representation of an angled square is offset by an underlying relief of an identical square, though tilting in the opposite direction. The rocking motion to and fro occurs within the bounds of another perfectly square canvas stretcher. In a sense there is movement in all directions within this earlier work that has been played out in more elaborate ways since; a movement between front and back of the picture plane, between the pictorial space of the painted square and real space of the form sticking out of the picture plane; and between the imagined movement and the immobile constituent parts.
It is this dialogue between forms and process, and between opposites, that provides the clues for the three magnets which Galea has produced in association with the show. Like their intended function, these magnets adhere themselves figuratively to the ‘space’ of Model. Providing a further dimension, they refer to our understanding of the gallery space, encouraging us to question, think and perceive; to consider the dialectics of space, depth and perceptual motion; to contemplate the ‘cell of intimacy’.
Natasha Bullock
Catalogue essay for Mark Galea – Model, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2001
Colour by Numbers
“The best thing about Warhol’s work is the color.”Donald Judd[1]
I am sure that Mark Galea was not thinking of Andy Warhol’s play on ‘colour by number’ kits in Warhol’s Do It Yourself paintings of 1962 when he came up with the name of this exhibition, but regardless, the connection between Warhol’s practice and that of Galea is in fact not as tenuous as it may first appear. Galea’s painting and sculpture reveals a commitment to and investigation of twentieth-century modernist abstraction and an ongoing dialogue with the work of a number of artists who were passionately engaged in this pursuit. That this approach sits in stark contrast to both the work and philosophy of his idiosyncratic Pop predecessor is of course undeniable. However, Galea is not concerned with replicating the divisions and differences between earlier movements or styles within his work, but instead absorbs and utilises recent art history in a more diffuse and ultimately, interesting way. Mark Galea’s exuberant paintings, sculpture and installation bring together the formal qualities of Minimalism, Conceptualism’s use of systems and codes (and its often self-imposed parameters for making), and Pop art’s embrace of the everyday, witnessed through the high-keyed colours of contemporary life. Galea has encouraged the viewer to manipulate different components of sculptures and at times, sections of paintings across his oeuvre, and these important elements of play and experimentation endlessly extend, and in effect create, a diverse and unexpected range of perceptual effects. Just as Warhol’s interruption of the relationship between specific numbers and colours in his aforementioned series tilted expectations and made one look anew, nothing is tied down or sits still for too long within the immersive and activated zones of colour and form in Galea’s practice. If we remain open to the possibilities presented by these works, the meditative spaces they both establish and occupy are at once intellectually engaging and aesthetically rewarding.
The group of sculptures that Mark Galea has created for this exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery builds upon his fascination with colour and the form of the grid, and specifically, the seemingly endless opportunities that are presented when the two are imaginatively combined. In many ways for Galea, these different but interconnected concerns break art down to its most basic of building blocks, which alternatively present the artist with a challenge, starting point and/or source of potential liberation.[2]The four new works that Galea has based upon Cuisenaire rods immediately introduce an element of nostalgia, memory and play into the gallery space for the generation of the audience that can actually remember using them – feelings not generally associated with abstract minimal sculpture. In a work such as Colour by numbers2,1,2,5,10, 2009 to take just one example, the artist transforms these simple childhood tools of learning (and specifically, mathematics) into Donald Judd-like rectangular forms that similarly command and occupy space. Yet what is especially interesting in this quirky transformation of Judd’s sculptural practice, is the manner in which the all-encompassing and much-heralded gestalt experience of his sculpture is both encouraged and somehow strangely denied in looking at these works. Galea’s sculptures may indeed start with Judd’s neatly contained rectangular forms but in several works he allows the sizes (and hence numerical values) of the individual Cuisenaire rods to break out of these confines – the white (or 1cm) rod jauntily balances at the top of Colour by numbers, 1,4,5, 2009 for example, just as the red (2cm) rod lays across the green and the black in Colour by numbers 2,3,7, 2009.
Unlike Judd’s industrially fabricated works, which are produced to the artist’s specifications by technicians and/or tradesmen, Galea’s arresting sculptures are invested with a warmth and humanity that results from the successful combination of several factors: the original childhood source that serves as their inspiration, the nature of their development from models to sculptural forms, and the significance of hand crafting to their exacting construction and carefully stained wooden surfaces. Galea’s starting point for these works was a much loved and well-worn set of Cuisenaire rods that belong to his partner. Mimicking the play that is central to their success as a teaching aid, he used these tiny rods – whose once vibrant colours had changed over time to a palette of warm, faded hues – as building blocks for forms that would eventually result in scaled-up sculptures. It is no surprise, given the influence (and it must be said, interruption) of puzzles and systems across Galea’s oeuvre that the connection between mathematics and scale in Cuisenaire rods held particular appeal, as did their ability to succeed as both educational tools and the most simple of toys.[3]As Lara Travis has commented:
Cuisenaire rods were basically an abstraction that revealed the underlying structures of mathematical concepts in a physical form.[4]
Developed over an extended period, the four Colour by numberssculptures reveal Galea’s innate understanding of the sense of satisfaction that is conjured by the observation of and physical interaction with squared-up rectangular forms, as well as his willingness to undermine such expectations and spatial experience by deliberately pulling these forms apart. This kind of knowing and wicked disruption is similarly played out by the artist through the juxtaposition of colours such as yellow, pink, red and orange, which according to the ‘rules’ of Cuisenaire, also determine the particular length and numerical value of the individual rods. The integral link between form and colour thus ensures that Galea’s determination of the final work results in part from a willingness to relinquish complete control; a practice that is also central to the work of a number of modernist artists that he admires. As Briony Fey discusses:
The history of color is intimately bound up with the history of chance as it had been articulated within modernism by Stéphane Mallarmé and Samuel Beckett. One of the most frequent points of connection has been between colors and numbers. Counting and coloring – from paintings by numbers to counting the numbers of squares in a color chart – intertwine at some basic level that is not about the math. There is no mathematical relationship between numbers and colors (unlike between numbers and musical notes in harmonics, for example), only an elaborate and vast sea of numbers that have been invented to create a fictional system. Like the color chart, numerical sequences offer ready-made serial systems for encoding information, and so it is not surprising that the combination should come to occupy such a prominent place in the artistic imagination by the mid-1960s. Once a numerical system was set out, the accidental and random effects of matching and mismatching color could quickly come into play. The nicely “dumb” effect of what seems like the most elementary listing of colors belies the elaborate scrambling of serial and sensual that is the experience of much of this work – not because the sensual and the serial are opposites but precisely because they are not.[5]
The influence of and possibilities presented by childhood toys in Mark Galea’s practice is also evident in his continued use of forms based on Playplax – a construction-based toy of the 1960s and 70s comprising sheets of multi-coloured acrylic that can be slotted together to create various structures. This simple form has literally served as a building block for a number of Galea’s earlier sculptures, and when combined with carefully layered squares of colour – applied in successive, transparent veils so that the light can shine through, he has used the relationship between these different components to both explode, fragment and multiply the (supposed) rigidity of the grid. As the artist has stated:
My work to date has been based on the strategic breakdown of an area based on the square and the grid. In doing so, a build up of colour and shape emerges through transparent layers of colour. Sampling of colour from the real world as well patterns from printed material have been among my sources to date.
Using puzzles, games and learning devices as a delivery system for colour and pattern, these layers have the potential to become particularly complex.[6]
The jostling and overlapping of colour and form in these sculptures establishes an almost palpable sense of movement and rotation, just as the at times teetering elements of different works seem to push at the limits of stability and hence, threaten collapse. The luminous beauty of these structures lures the viewer in – it also helps that they are both playful and fun – encouraging an active physical engagement with their overall form that in turn creates a series of shifting perceptual effects. These works draw upon multiple associations – from the clean lines and blocky forms of modernist architecture, through to “stained glass windows and TV test patterns”[7], and maintain a sense of lightness that is similarly reflected in their application and use of colour and the material from which they are skilfully made.
The works’ ability to seemingly float in space is pushed to its ultimate conclusion in mobile structures such as Understanding the meaning of new dance steps, 2005 (Collection: Bendigo Art Gallery), in which individual panels of acrylic painted with squares of colours in closely related hues, are suspended from the ceiling by a string of metal wire that enables each form to tilt, rotate, and as the title above suggests, hypnotically dance in space. These works demand to be experienced ‘in the round’, and as the circumnavigation of the audience activates each panel, they respond in different ways to both the movement of air and the shifting properties of light, creating in turn a series of perceptual and optical effects that are themselves constantly in motion. Each interaction with these sculptures is a unique and ever-changing experience.
Galea’s Do It Yourselfworks – an ongoing series of shelf-based paintings that commenced in the late 1990s – similarly invite the involvement of the viewer and willingly open themselves up to the different results, and effects created by, the audiences’ participation. In these works, acrylic sheets in a variety of colours are displayed upon a shelf and we are encouraged to both play with and alter the painting’s ‘composition’[8]by moving and overlaying the panels; thus creating a spectrum of new colours as the works change with the addition or subtraction of their multi-coloured parts. While the works’ overarching title can be seen (like Warhol’s series of paintings), to encourage viewers to literally do as directed, this phrase, when employed by Galea, also amusingly refers to the current craze for DIY and home renovation TV shows that proliferate in contemporary culture. It is not without irony of course that within this recent phenomenon, abstraction is often reduced to a meaningless form of decoration – something that anyone can make to ‘jazz up a room’ or hang over the couch. For Galea, this link similarly reverberates across a number of the works’ expanded titles – for example, Adapted to local conditions, 2005 and For your convenience, new and improved, structurally enhanced Do-It-Yourself Title, 2003 (which is a Playplax-inspired sculpture) – an inclusive and ‘hands off’ attitude to the both the configuration and at times, naming of his work that the artist describes as “more like the Ikea [flat pack] approach to art and very appealing. A bit like giving someone a pack of coloured paper squares …”[9]
Mark Galea’s sculptural and painting practice is integrally connected, and like the work of many of his modernist precursors, his paintings largely begin within the framework of a pre-devised system or plan. In his hands however, this system is allowed to, and often does, mess up – resulting in a different and completely unexpected set of challenges to which the artist must ultimately respond. As he has explained, this kind of problem solving is inherent to the work:
The titles of these paintings [of 2005] provide a loose key into my current interests and hint at their source. While such references can provide a plan or a set of rules for my work in the studio, more often than not, the plans are abandoned and the rules are broken.[10]
As part of this process, the surface of Galea’s paintings undergo a variety of visual and particularly, chromatic transformations until they are finally deemed completed – each a unique and at times, complex arrangement of multi-coloured, intersecting and overlapping squares slowly built of transparent layers of carefully applied paint.
Puzzles, games and visual systems have similarly served as both a source of inspiration and springboard for ideas for Galea’s paintings. One series, for example, used the form of the Sudoku puzzle as a starting point, with the numbers – which were each represented by a colour – providing an automated basis for the act of painting itself. The fact that the puzzle requires only one number in any line or square initially ensured an even distribution of colour across the painting, but this was quickly interrupted by Galea, who subsequently overlaid the results of three puzzles from Melbourne newspaper The Age over three successive days – thus transforming the original nine colours into a complex composition of 81 squares with the possibility of up to 81 colours. In line with this imposed (and deliberately fragmented) system, the mixing of colour in Galea’s paintings occurs upon the canvas, opening the results up to the vicissitudes of chance and ensuring that the history of the work’s construction is actually embedded within its surface.[11]A major painting from this series was wittily titled Tough, Moderate, Gentle, 2007which is the difficulty rating assigned to each of the puzzles that comprised the work.
An understanding and use of pure form has remained important to Galea throughout his career. The paintings for example, are always based on the square (or as it more commonly appears in art parlance, the grid) and the sculptural work upon the cube.[12]The result of a series of decisions and actions, 2009,the monumental new sculpture that Galea has produced for this exhibition, makes this relationship manifest; delineating and occupying the shape of an enormous cube by the most restrained and minimal of means – essentially, the outline of its form. This work comes from the development of a smaller piece that the artist made in 1993, before he was aware of the open cube work of American abstractionist Sol LeWitt; an artist he much admires, and whose practice remains a touchstone.[13]Whether singular or arranged in complex multiples, LeWitt’s open cube sculptures (which began in the 1960s and continued for several decades) sit squarely, and remain – despite the repeated patterns of their gridded, open structures – self-enclosed forms that establish an immediate and very specific relationship to their audience.[14]These works are comprehended physically, but at a certain remove or distance. In Galea’s work (like LeWitt’s), each side of the cube is represented by a line or rectangle, but by expanding its form exponentially and resting it on its points, the artist turns a static viewing experience into a bodily, interactive one – our relationship to the work, and our experience and understanding of it, changes and is enriched by its invitation to actually penetrate and move within its simple, elegant form. As Galea has stated:
I had made a form from cardboard … of gradating sized pieces that felt like an architectural model, so the prospect of being able to be surrounded by a piece appealed. Initially I thought the viewer could be able to just walk into the centre of this work but the fact that you are required to bend into it is more engaging.[15]
The disruption of ‘ordinary’ (and expected) spatial relationships that occurs in this work and both the unusual physical and perceptual effects that this disruption creates, has interested Galea for many years. In his work Model, 2000 for example, the artist took the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s Gallery 2 (when the Gallery was situated in Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens) and rotated it 90 degrees, effectively turning the gallery on its side. Encompassing the entire space, Galea’s seamless overlay had visitors entering the room by walking on what appeared to be the gallery wall; its actual walls transformed, as a result, into the gallery’s ceiling and floor. The feeling of spatial disorientation and the “complex dialogue between spatiality and the body”[16]that Galea establishes in Modeland The result of a series ...creates an implied sense of motion and rotation that is actually a hallmark of much of his practice.
Across his oeuvre Mark Galea continues to reinvest in and reinvigorate the rich history of 20thcentury modernism. When combined with his often playful source materials, experimental sensibility, and joyous use of colour, the results that emerge from the artist’s sustained involvement in a dialogue between form and process are both unexpected and delightful.
Kelly Gellatly
Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria
Catalogue essay for Colour By Numbers 2009, Bendigo Art Gallery
[1]Donald Judd, “Andy Warhol” Arts Magazine, 37, no. 4, January 1963, p. 49 as quoted in Briony Fer, “Color Manual” in Ann Temkin, Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008, p. 30.
[2]This is also poignantly reflected in the title of Galea’s new sculpture, The result of a series of decisions and actions, 2009. Email correspondence with the author, 18 July 2009.
[3]New Zealand-based artist Michael Parekowhai has also used Cuisenaire rods in his sculptural work, as has Australia’s Andrew McQualter in his piece pier and ocean, 1997; but their intentions are quite different to those of Mark Galea here. For a recent discussion of Michael Parekowhai’s work see Sarah Hopkinson, “Michael Parekowhai”, Art World, issue 9, June/July 2009, pp. 94-101. For discussion of Andrew McQualter’s Cuisenaire rod sculpture, see Lara Travis “Andrew McQualter” in See here now: Vizard Collection of the 1990s, Thames & Hudson, Fishermans Bend, Victoria, 2003, pp. 88-89.
[4]Lara Travis “Andrew McQualter”, pp. 88.
[5]Briony Fer, “Color Manual” in Ann Temkin, Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, pp. 33-34.
[6]Email correspondence with the author, 21 July 2009.
[7]Bree Richards, “Mark Galea: Somewhere over the rainbow”, Contemporary Australia: Optimism, exh. cat., Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2008, p. 99.
[8]The correlation to painting here is no accident. Galea has described his recent shelf work, A new light on an optimistic outlook, 2009 (seen in the exhibition Andrew Christofides, Richard Dunn & Mark Galeaat Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 9 July to 1 August 2009)as “like an exploded view of a painting”. Email correspondence with the author, 18 July 2009.
[9]Email correspondence with the author, 18 July 2009.
[10]Mark Galea, artist statement, Sherrie Knipe & Mark Galea, exh. sheet, Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney, 27 September to 22 October 2005, n.p.
[11]I am grateful to Mark Galea for this explanation. Email correspondence with the author, 18 July 2009.
[12]In the case of the Colour by number sculptures, it is actually a multiple of the cube.
[13]Email correspondence with the author, 18 July 2009.
[14]See Sol Le Witt (ed.), Sol LeWitt – Structures 1962-1993, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1993.
[15]Email correspondence with the author, 18 July 2009.
[16]Natasha Bullock, “Perceptual motion, abstraction and the art of Mark Galea”, Mark Galea: Model, exhibition room sheet, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2000, n.p.