Jasper Knight - PRIMARY
Mar 22 - Apr 23
"Jasper Knight has an enduring love for construction, for industrial materials and for working with his hands. It is this highly contemporary approach to painting that informs and sustains his practice. Knight has emerged from the Sydney art scene over the last 2 years and during this time his approach to materials has become ever more nuanced and complex. Beginning with paintings incorporating layers of wood veneers and torn and distressed recycled cardboard, he has since moved to a more constructivist practice, which involves assembled canvases made up of found signs, coloured Perspex and various textured wood panels, as though Rosalie Gascoigne had been let loose in an industrial workshop. Knight draws out enamel figurations over these complex material grids in a painterly fashion equally informed by graffiti and by the gestural painting practices of modernism. In Knight's paintings, the fluid dynamics of drips cascade over the geometry of wood and Perspex joinery, and it is here that the linkage between postmodern sculptural modes and Knight's painting is most clearly evident. It is in fact this blend of historical influences that underscores the contemporaneity of Knight's work.
In Primary, the artist's first Melbourne exhibition, eighteen works
are gathered as a culmination of his 'wharf' series. First seen at scale
in the Wynne Prize of 2005, Knight has consistently worked on this theme
for the last eighteen months. The tension between the lapping water
and the bollards, stairs and geometric rails that make up a wharf has
proven rich territory for the artist to explore through his materials,
as the liquidity of the enamel and the glossy face of Perspex combine
to create a surface that somehow captures the very essence of water,
and as the wharf pylons themselves soften and threaten to become part
of the aquatic field in which they stand.
This exhibition is split into three parts around the three primary colours.
Primary colours have an immense history in art and philosophy, from
Aristotle's association of blue and yellow with the elemental dualism
of the world to Renaissance representations of the Holy Trinity or the
Three Graces to Piet Mondrian's Neo-Plasticist spiritual modernism.
In this exhibition a deep chromatic resonance links the works, underpinning
the keen sense of line and economic handling of form, a strength previously
seen in Knight's portrait of the conductor and music educator Richard
Gill, which was included in the 2005 Archibald Prize.
Over these chromatic geometries Knight has captured rapidly disappearing
scenes. Half of the subjects of these paintings are industrial sites
and ferry landings around the Sydney foreshore. For the other half,
Knight has turned his eye to the abandoned and run-down Piers 20, 21
and 22 at the end of the Melbourne Docklands. These eerie places, in
which re-development is no doubt imminent, bear the legacy of the industrial
ports which once beat as the heart of our cities, a pulse which resonates
on the surface of Knight's canvases, with the unique and evocative formal
qualities of these places celebrated and preserved forever in colour
and line".
Dr Dougal Phillips
College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales
