Reviewer: Sasha Grishin.

At the age of 50, Melbourne-based artist David Frazer is being nationally acclaimed as a serious printmaker, one who happily works across the whole gambit of printmaking technologies, including wood engraving, etching, linocut and lithography.

A romantic by temperament, in his art Frazer is a storyteller. The narratives appear complex and are conveyed in great detail, but they also remain enigmatic and we are not provided with sufficient clues to arrive at a clear interpretation. They are also narratives tinged with the black absurd – a man is stranded in a boat in a dried-up creek bed, a couple walk off into infinity or a caravan appears stranded in the middle of nowhere. Not much happens in his narratives, although the potential for something to happen is immense. His figures have always reminded me of Vladimir and Estragon waiting for their Godot by a leafless tree, but now somewhere in the Australian outback.

Frazer in a large linocut, titled The text message, shows a man, possibly an image of the artist, looking at his mobile phone, whilst standing in a desolate landscape made up of dead spiky trees. The whole scene is treated in intricate detail with the ground, the bark on the trees, the solid floating clouds, pebbles and tufts of grass all exactingly and lovingly cut out of the lino and printed in crisp black ink. There are no other clues provided. It could be a scene marking the end to a tragic love affair or simply a man receiving confirmation that he has a dentist appointment slightly later in the week. The sense of enigma, futility and even a tinge of despair, can all be read into this scene. It is up to the viewer to own and complete the narrative.

A recurring theme in Frazer's oeuvre is that of a journey, sometimes in a caravan, on other occasions, on foot. In this exhibition the journeys are by boat: in the etching The slow boat, the lithograph Drift and the wood engraving Up shit creek. What they all have in common is the absolute certainty that this journey is futile and will go nowhere as, in all instances, the boat is on dry ground and the rower seated in it is aimlessly waiting for something to happen. Are they waiting for a great flood? Are these images a comment on climate change and the continuous drought in outback Australia?

Frazer's figures are both absurdly silly and helpless, and lack motivation to change their lot. I always leave David Frazer's exhibitions with a slightly melancholy feeling, as if I have witnessed something quite important and possibly quite tragic. As an artist, Frazer, in his immaculately worked prints, weaves an allegory concerning life in contemporary Australia, where in the face of immense problems, we are driven to absurd acts or to inactivity. These are quiet and unassuming prints that assert a powerful and disturbing presence, which is slightly haunting, slightly mysterious and questions our existence within the imagined bliss of rural Australia.