Peter Maloney’s latest paintings are a hyped-up colour enterprise, embedded with absurdist cut-up texts painted from tabloids and magazines, reprising William Burroughs’ linguistics and punk graphics.
In conversation Maloney often asserts a post-gay, post-AIDS sensibility, even if at times those issues are almost imperceptible in his work. He also alludes to his in utero ‘experience’ of the first British atomic test in the West Australian Montebello Islands when his mother stood, heavily pregnant, on their Onslow verandah watching the explosion on 3 October, 1952. Maloney says he often wonders if he was affected in some way by that occurrence and that the endless radiating lines in his paintings represent x-ray shock waves, ‘born before he was born’.
Utopia Art Sydney
4 to 25 July, 2015
Sydney
The Bottom Of My Heart, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 170 x 130cm
Courtesy of the artist and Utopia Art Sydney