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"That we live in strange times goes without saying. More and more the news seems to suggest a world on the point of conflagration

Now I would never describe Tim Storrier as a political artist, but there can be no doubt that something about his latest body of paintings captures the zeitgeist. Fire has been an ongoing theme in his work since his early, and now famous, burning ropes, which he began in 1981. But fire in Storrier's oeuvre has always seemed a purely poetic metaphor, a surreal trope to capture the sense of ritual that involved being in the Australian outback. It has been a metaphor for survival and sacrifice and sustenance. He has burnt rope and timber, meat and fruit, in private ceremonies on the canvas.

Viewers were entranced, staring into the flames and no doubt concocting their own stories to sit with the canvas. Telling stories around a fire is an age-old practice; the bogeyman was kept at bay by even scarier monsters of the imagination. Today the role of fire has been replaced in most communities by the television set.

Now Storrier may not be a political artist, but he has long been fascinated with history. In the 1970s he traveled through Egypt, imposing himself and his structures on the desert. Part of his fascination for the region was his thirst for knowledge about the British writer and soldier T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia. It was Lawrence who managed that Herculean task of melding the Arab tribes to fight as one. Lawrence's guarantees to the Arab nations were never honoured by his government, which, over time, led to the newly fractured desert states of today.

Where the British desired 'Empire', the contemporary catch word is 'Democracy,' but the parallels are eerily familiar to those who look back on the history of the Middle East. Today the media is almost constantly ablaze; burning pipe lines, smoking Mosques in Baghdad, skyscrapers in Manhattan engulfed in smoke, smoldering buses in the street.

But in Storrier's paintings such mayhem will pass. While we are captivated by the burning pages of newspapers, they are set against a gently glowing night sky and night birds soar at a safe distance. Storrier seems to be saying to us look beyond the chaos, the mad minutiae of everyday life and the mundane morass of popular culture, look at the night sky and the glorious colours of a desert sunset. The news, despite its horrors and fears, will pass, but the sky will remain.

An Economy of Dust and Ashes (Pastoral Domestic) 2005-6 features a tableau with a gutted television complete adorned with desiccated flowers in an empty wine bottle, while next to it a pyre of newspaper burns. The TV is either a vacant box through which the desert winds pour, or reportage of the mass media burning; a replication of the guts of the painting.
A reflection of a reflection; television as an echo, as a void.

According to the Sydney-based writer Laura Murray Cree, commenting on Storrier's depiction of abstracted wordage of newspaper: "This is not the Word that is God (the Alpha and Omega), but the babble of ignorance, lies and media speak.

'The text in these works is merely indicated by the artist; it carries no weight of meaning as such. More to the point is the simultaneous ubiquity and transience of the daily news….
Cultural deconstruction - the 'cacophony of wisdom' - is well advanced in this body of work…, but not absolute. Lines of communication catch and burn, television images are reduced to a memory, and the primal elements of dust and ash are omnipresent.'

In Ashes, Frame and Lament (2005) Storrier's newspapers are rendered in the form of a crucifix. Are the pages obituaries? A sense of melancholy loss infuses these works; a sense of time passing and largely wasted. The crucifix under Storrier's hand is not so much a religious symbol as it is a metaphor for time and contemplation...

...In essence this is the crux of Storrier's blazing new series of works. For all its skillful beauty, it is a meditation on time and, inevitably, mortality. But it is also a scathing account on how we spend our time. Speaking to Storrier recently, he expressed how much he despised trash culture and the television set becomes an iconic totem of what he calls 'that nonsense.'

The television in Storrier's paintings, an image that in the past he has set fire to and drowned in sea water, abused in every way possible, is symbolic of a loss of standards, a visual metaphor for the desecration of culture and the loss of knowledge that it implies. We live in a fast forward moment where standards have been discarded for fast food, fast money, immediate satisfaction, immediate gratification, all without the hard work that once made such terms worthwhile.

We may be able to 'google' the words 'passion', 'loss', 'mortality' and 'time', but without standards to apply them to, what use are they?

Storrier and I have traveled together on a number of occasions; through the Serengeti of Africa, to the remote ruins of Nemrut Dagi in Turkey, the Groucho Club in London and to Lake Eyre in Central Australia. We have had long lunches and good red wines more often than I can count (or remember). Despite claiming a somewhat conservative sensibility, I have seen his immense generosity towards his fellow human beings - regardless of race, creed or class - on numerous occasions. He has always made out to be Timothy Austin Storrier who wears his Order of Australia badge with great - indeed almost arrogant - pride, who wears his tailor made RM Williams with a kind of arrogant bush aristocracy air.

And it is that fact that, regardless of my admiration for his meticulous skills and aesthetic genius throughout his career, I believe these may well be the most important works Storrier has ever made. The message is not overt, in the way that so much boring work made in the 1960s and '70s was, when artists thought they had some political right to tell us how to live. It is a personal protest, a rejection of untenable values. But it is not heavy-handed. The viewer is freed to draw their own judgements from these images.

But what I believe Storrier is saying in these luminous, intriguing paintings is Wake Up. That our culture - Western culture - is fast becoming dust and ashes. Obsession with celebrity, tabloid news, light-weight opinion pieces, are anathema. That reality TV is far removed from reality.

Storrier is onto something here. This entire exhibit can be read as a comment on the loss of both knowledge and standards. It can also be read as a meditation on mortality - an apt position to contemplate what is worthwhile in life. It is not a meditation on death - Storrier is still a young artist - but there is a sense of time passing, of loss. There is an urgency in this message; a wake up call to us all. The sometimes bewildering array of knowledge available to us should be worthy of celebration, not denial. Of course there is an alternative. Just turn on the television."

Ashley Crawford, Melbourne, 2006