Face Apart

16th February – 3rd March, 2012

Opening Night:
Thursday 16th February, 6.30 – 8.30pm

Salerno Gallery presents “Face Apart“, an exhibition of selected contemporary portraiture from five Sydney artists. Stylistically and thematically varied, each individual artists explores our most familiar figurative tool for expression – the human face.

The act of observing is linked to interpreting and understanding. Through the use of portraiture, artists can identify and communicate elements of human existence. Whether it be a narrative, an idea or a feeling, portraiture offers an opportunity to express a unique and personal perspective and contribute to cultural discourse.

This exhibition will showcase over 20 unique artworks in paint, ink an mixed media by Anton Pulvirenti, Simon Lovelace, Phil Aston Williams, Alice Blandeau-Thomas, Sal Higgens and Araby Steen.

>> Online catalogue available here <<

Artists Statements

Alice Blandeau-Thomas
“Using images released in the Australian media, I have produced paintings of some of the 97 people who went missing while traveling by boat between Indonesia and Australia in 2010. Through the creation of individual personal portraits, I wish to to convey upon the viewer the notion of loss, loss of identity and of self. An opposite perspective to mainstream Australian media.”

Sal Higgens
Sal Higgens’ portraiture veers more towards portraiture of the self than self portraiture. She is interested in a play of forces, the external and the internal. The physical manifestation of these battles expressed in bodily form. In the gladiatorial arena of the self, wars are waged between emotional, biological and spiritual forces.

Anton Pulvirenti
For the past decade Anton’s work has addressed a family history of internment. The portraits in this exhibition specifically refer to the Australian First World War internment camps that interned Germans. It depicts men dressed as female singers for a German opera, which was performed in the internment camp at Trial Bay on the mid NSW coast during the First World War. Ambiguous sexuality becomes a symbol of the legal diffusion of the internee. Precise draftsmanship is a language for accurate memory of the war internments. The naturalism is contradictory however, in that the attempt to precisely remember succeeds only in covering over the events of the past. These works suggest that present policies of detention have a history deeply rooted not only in the past war internments, but in a philosophical Western worldview that has sought to dominate and control all forms of life.

Phil Aston Williams
My practice focuses on developing innovative methods of image construction. Pragmatic transformations of traditional painting techniques lent through ideas born of other media and technology. Casting and sanding paint with a mechanical manufactured instrumentality; Collaging, stenciling and adhering paint in a ‘cut copy” approach. Elements of play, kitsch and psychedelia celebrate and lighten the intensity and parable like foundations of experimental and non-representational painting. The incorporation of figuration and line weave narrative and emotion. In particular Pop imagery emphasizes a simplified idealism and transient lifespan which I find akin to abstraction’s refined notions of the ephemeral and absolute.

Araby Steen
Lisa Mulholland describes Araby’s work perfectly when she says “Steen paints images of solitude; they are a glimpse into the intimate, they speak of intimacy-or more precisely extimacy- they are the expression of the intimate unconscious that is actually external to us. Put simply, this is the thing that stirs us, that is part of us yet that which is actually our exteriority. By no means, however are Steen’s oil paintings a deliberate expression of symbolic or personal nostalgia; they are expressions in which we can all share”.

Simon Lovelace
Influenced by pop art culture and surreal narrative, Simon’s work explores the themes of pop iconography, mortality, sexuality and the taboo “with meticulous detailing and finishes and imagery appropriated from retro commercial sources… a weird alchemy by which cheesecake, superheroes, bondage and bad language come together as social observation”.