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Voicing 'The Other'
A GARY WILLIS painting is as subtle as it is shocking. He deceptively utilises what should be stylistic contradictions - the painterly and the kitsch - to explore new visual territory, reflecting the inner thoughts we sometimes voice but rarely enact. They are not intended to be 'nice pictures' but windows into a kaleidoscope of emotional landscapes - we are reminded of Jean Cocteau's "Le sang d' un poet" (The blood of the poet) .
Willis' work comes from a long tradition of figurative expressionism; 'The Angry Penguins' -'The Cobra Group' - 'Neue Sachlichkeit' - 'The Antipodeans' ,and the painterly traditions of Arthur Boyd. Boyd, who frequently works thick oil into images with his fingers and hands, has been a major influence since 1971 when, as a promising art student, Willis was first introduced to Australia's leading expressionist painter. Growing up around Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, Willis' own work was forged in a time when artists threw away the rulebooks and explored the limits of their professions. Willis has always been something of a tearaway, prepared to lose blood in performance, for the name of art.
Following a period spent in post punk New York in the late 1970s (CB-GB's, the Mudd Club, the Chelsea Hotel, the Warhol scene) Willis returned to Australia to enact a 12-movement performance piece 'The Leopard', echoing Joseph Beuys' N.Y. performance piece 'Coyote'. 'The Leopard' was a reconstruction of a long detailed dream - the essence of a volatile time spent in New York artworld. 'Play Darts'... Co-performer Richard Boulez, as 'The Leopard', quickly turns the tables on Willis, 'The Ringmaster', whipping him into a frenzied running on the spot that ends with Willis, collapsing to the floor. He rests to catch his breath and stands up, only for the scene to be repeated - and again. "The Leopard" develops into a live and bloody fight scene. Boulez is armed with a knife and Willis has a chair. Blood pumps as the two tangle. Willis says he was reconstructing life's little lessons, in abstract - 'at risk of life and limb'.
Another significant series emerging from Willis' neo-pop period is 'The Five Senses'. A suite of five pieces in coloured electrical tape laminated into heavy plastic sheeting; 'Feel Like Target' -'Tastes Like Goodbye' - 'Sounds Like - You Do' - 'Smells Like Success' - 'Looks Like It Is''. 'Feel Like Target' is appropriated from an image of Marilyn Monroe with her dress blown up over a subway grate, except Willis' model is bending over, but ''between the hairs and holes you suddenly realise you are looking straight down the barrel of a gun,'' says Willis. In this suite of pictures Willis attempted to locate his essential experience of his time in New York, all five are dramatic.
Although Willis began his career as a painter at the Canberra School of Art, he soon transferred to Melbourne's conceptual art school, P.I.T., in the early 1970s. His works have been acquired by many of Australia's state galleries, Australian National University, National Gallery of Australia. His work has ranged from performances, installations and video to murals for Fitzroy's avant-garde cabaret 'The Flying Trapeze'. He has exhibited widely in Australia as well as New York, Tokyo, Paris. In 1984 he was awarded the Australia Council 'London Studio' at the Air Gallery, London and his work was exhibited at the Portsmouth City Museum.
Since his return to London in 1990, he has been concerned with the interplay of materials and subject: the varying thickness' of the oil paint, the quality of the cloth surface, the use of palette knives, the brushes and the base material - the inner, vulnerable, protected self. ''I don't intend to disturb,'' says Willis, reflecting on the unframed pieces strewn across the floor of his basement flat in the Boyd family's Highgate house. 'I push the image to a point of clarity, I keep pushing it until - Aha - Now I'm getting it - Yes - Ah and I keep pushing at it until I find that edge'. 'It doesn't interest me unless I have got that level of connection with the image. They're not outrageous, but they can be uncomfortable, they are not driven by notions of good taste, design or architecture'. As the paint is applied, the images evolve, repeatedly shifting levels, sifting thoughts, eventually they begin to resolve themselves, rarely ending where they started. His finished works are frequently but not exclusively thick ... and unframed are deceptively heavy.
While initially they take some time to decode, eventually they become compelling. In 'A final glimpse of Eden', the glance - a smear of white paint -from a woman he had barely met, is interpreted as having 'enormous potential for the downfall of Eden'. A moment we all know and recognise in our own lives - love steps onto a departing train, requiring an instant, but momentous decision. 'I'm painting what exists, it's a psychological landscape. They are not simply aesthetic exercises. It's the human condition and it is deeply subjective. The model is deeply flawed and not necessarily a good sample, but I'm the only model I've got.' If he could bore into someone else's heart, mind and soul sufficiently to find a moment to represent he would, but that's more difficult to arrange. 'They can take a long time to construct. I want them to be painterly. The painting is not just an image, but an object.' The painting is loose fluid and poetic, they are alive and volatile. 'I'm trying to make pictures, which abstract upon my relationship with the world any moment in time. To picture those feelings which are difficult to express, but often share more intimately than we often imagine.'
It is the intuitive voice of the passionate other. 'The human condition is rifled through with intuition, but in the context of social protocols, it is often difficult to give voice to these levels of consideration, thus these paintings become icons of the intuitive. They enable the recognition of the mytho-poetic - it's a relatively classic place for painting to occupy'. Although Willis has been painting professionally for more than 20 years, the energy and intensity in both his own persona and the works he creates, makes it hard not to think of him as anything other than a ''young artist'', albeit an accomplished and experienced one. Many of these paintings are alive with a potency and excitement of a single moment captured in oil. They ''stop'' in the photographic sense, the action, preserving the moment of that inner or other voice. It's as if the pathway from Willis' thought to the paint and the surface was a camera with a very fast shutter speed, capturing in oil paint that intellectual action-shot.
Go to David Langsam's Site - 'Gary Willis- Disturbing Europe'