Peter Maloney: To Australia!

In Peter Maloney’s solo exhibition ‘To Australia!’ we see the artist return to the muted colour palette of his early career. Gone are the lurid pinks and lime greens that sprawl and streak to the very edges of the canvas. Instead, coils of white lines ripple and quiver outwards from the artwork’s centre, seeming to both emerge and recede into the shadowy haze of the painting’s murky ground.

The lineal compositions of Maloney’s new work began as humble doodles sketched during a period of inpatient treatment. Using his distinctive methodology of photocopy and tracing, his original marks have distended and swollen in scale, but it seems the psychological impact of the hospital bed remains. The configurations appear like ghostly apparitions in a halo of darkness, with some pieces such as, The Shearest Void (2016), containing ebbing echoes of the central motif subsiding into the surrounding blackness. These are works that explicitly concern themselves with the vulnerability of the body and human mortality. After all, to photocopy or trace is to make a ghost of the original, creating a reductive replica without the essence of the initial image.

On one hand, these paintings carry on the grand tradition of modernist abstraction – a customary wonderment and horror in the face of our own mortality, that one truly universal human experience. But on the other hand, Maloney’s paintings are too grounded in the present, too concerned with the need to historicise our hopes and fears, to align wholly with modernist ideals.

The works recall medical visualisations of the body’s internal ecosystem, evoking microbial colonies in agar plates and microscopic imagery recognisable only to the professional pathologist. Or they can be interpreted as the contours of a fingerprint, returning us to thoughts of the artist’s hand and the immediacy and intimacy of the artist’s initial intuitive gestures.

One particularly potent association provoked by these new compositions is to the penetrative delineations of an X-ray, and it is this reference which gives the works a kind of reflexive circularity much like the twisted involutions of the lines themselves. Back in 1952, the as yet unborn artist lay curled up in his mother’s womb as she watched a British atomic bomb explode on a test site in north Western Australia. Maloney has previously spoken about the potential influence of this in utero experience; a violent first glimpse of a world aflame, witnessed from within the confines of the human body as a meteoric X-ray blast. The works of ‘To Australia!’ seem to reverberate with the potency of atomic energy as a weapon, as medical diagnostic tool and as a market force for one of our many nationally contentious and finite mineral resources.

Of course, Australia is not an enemy of England, but a colony. The detonations of the 1950’s were just a test, a mere display of brutality and not intended as the real thing because although the colonial rationale may have been founded on aggression, it is sustained by indifference. Maloney seems to hint that perhaps this imperial apathy regarding forms of destruction that have been deemed sufficiently distant might itself be internalised by the very Nation that was on the losing end of that all too relative remoteness. So we lock our doors, close our boarders and police our shorelines.

As a compilation of individual works, ‘To Australia!’ manages to oscillate between a political critique of colonial contempt, a detailed investigation of the visual language of scientific analysis and a deeply personal expression concerning the frailty of our transient flesh. Maloney thus manages to combine a kind of modernist objectivity with the very subjective lived experience of being in a particular body in a particular place, encouraging us all to reflect upon that essential human realisation that one day, each of us will not be.

Giselle Stanborough is an artist and writer based in Sydney.

Utopia Art Sydney
1 to 29 April, 2017
New South Wales