Rob McLeish, Sleepers #7, 2023. Oil on aluminium framed in Victorian Ash, 143 x 103cm. Courtesy: the artist and Neon Parc, Melbourne.
Neon Parc presents Air Like Wine, an exhibition by Rob McLeish and Bill Saylor at the Brunswick gallery.
For their first joint exhibition—and the premier of Saylor’s work in Australia—the duo present two distinct bodies of work linked by a shared approach to art making itself and a deep engagement with material processes.
In Air Like Wine McLeish presents a suite of new large-scale oil paintings on aluminium, collectively titled Sleepers. Continuing the artist’s interest in combining imagery appropriated from Classical mythology, Pop iconography and the outer recesses of the Internet, the works explore ideas of desire, decay and iconoclasm with exotic flora and ambiguous figuration.
Sleepers layers imagery that is digitally warped, manually applied, erased, re-applied, superimposed and further distorted through a process of screen printing, painting and mark-making. Employing a monochromatic colour palette that ranges from saturated blood-reds to deep inky purples, McLeish creates a drug-like haze in the works that imbues a psychological effect through a palpable tension between abstraction and representation.
Central to the series is the image of a reoccurring gestural abstraction painted by a Floridian monkey, overlaid with an array of manipulated imagery including swimming pools, bleeding orchids, iconic Caravaggio paintings and reiterations of the artist’s own meticulous drawings and sculptures.
Saylor presents a suite of new large-scale paintings for Air Like Wine that draw from an eclectic range of influences, from cave painting and graffiti to Abstract Expressionism. Imbuing a physicality that borders on hypertension, Saylor’s works are often built up from a variety of media, oil paint, charcoal, punctuated and balanced by elegiac passages of the brush and the inclusion of ephemera derived from pop culture.
As the critic Carlo McCormick writes about Saylor’s work, “Brut, unmannered, wild as a river or heath untouched by human intervention, Saylor’s paintings teach us that the act of perception as experience itself is filled with unpredictable motion and unruly emotions of life.”
Dense with recurring personal iconography, Saylor’s works demonstrate a profound engagement with environmental issues such as meteorology, natural history, and marine biology. Often populated by bizarre monsters, deformed sea creatures, and sinister skeletal figures that seem conjured from some ‘interim space’, his work evokes the shifting spectre of imminent ecological disaster.
Saylor often begins his large canvases flat and works outside against the elements at a summer cottage on the Delaware River in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania. This site of natural beauty imbues the paintings with a personal history and makes the paintings ‘strange attractors’.
