Maurice Denis famously declared in 1890, “Remember that a picture, before it is a war horse, a naked woman, or some anecdote, it is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.”

While the pronouncement was considered as a radical declaration of formalism in its day, by the 1950s, all aspects of this formula were questioned and the very existence of painting seemed under threat. Paintings did not need to have a subject, nor were they necessarily created on a flat surface, nor was the use of colour mandatory. So what is a painting and why should this matter?

Paintings amongst other things is an umbrella theme under which three discrete exhibitions in three separate venues with different dates and opening times have been assembled. The chief architect of the project is the Drill Hall curator, Tony Oates, who is also the curator of the exhibition at the Drill Hall. Broadly speaking, the theme of this exhibition deals with the varied approaches that artists have adopted to processes of art making, which to some extent have been associated with the art of painting.

Access to the phenomenal collections of 20th-century and contemporary international art at the National Gallery of Australia has meant that some art of a very high order could be included in the exhibition. However, the nebulous nature of the exhibition’s theme has resulted in a show that has little coherence and which conceptually pulls in many different directions. Possibly, this could be the main message that “medium” in the art practice of many artists has grown increasingly irrelevant and an artist can just as easily embrace collage, assemblage, three-dimensional forms and forms of bricolage, as well as the traditional arrangement of colours on a two-dimensional surface.

The showstopper at this exhibition is Robert Rauschenberg’s series of lithographic prints, Hoarfrost Editions (1974), on loan from the National Gallery. Rauschenberg’s basic philosophy, “I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world”, saw the artist scavenging newspapers and comics and printing these as offset lithographs on overlapping veils of diaphanous materials such as silk, satin, taffeta and muslin.

Hoarfrost is a beautiful fleeting phenomenon that occurs when dew freezes at night and a lacy film appears made up of tiny needle-like crystals. Rauschenberg had spent a couple of years working on illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, where there is a reference in canto 24: “In that part of the young year ... when hoarfrost mimes the image of his white sister upon the ground.” Rauschenberg observed in print studios that cheesecloths, which had been used by printers to clean ink from the presses and plates, were washed at the end of the day and were hung around the studio to dry, but they retained ghost-like impressions of the traces of ink. This reminded him of hoarfrost and by taking stories and images out of the Los Angeles Times and other sources and drawing on images of hot air balloons and gliders, Rauschenberg created this wonderful metaphor for the ephemerality of being.

The intriguing quality of these prints is that you look at them and through them like a simultaneous combination of negative and positive spaces, where the real world and the world of illusions seamlessly merge. There exists in these works a gossamer-like delicacy that draws you into the work, the more you examine it.

In contrast, at the exhibition there is also something like Lynda Benglis’s Roberta (1974), also on loan from the National Gallery. This controversial American sculptor created this large twisted knot with enamel paint, sculpmetal and tinsel on aluminium screening and foil. Like her famous photograph of herself naked and holding a large cast-latex double-headed dildo between her thighs, this sculptural piece defies many of the conventions of art making at the time. There is a deliberate tongue-in-cheek provocation.

One of the other pieces at the exhibition is by the American post-minimalist artist, Richard Tuttle, who when aged in his mid-70s made his Separation (Group 4, Number 5) (2015), where a “conventional” painting is seemingly propped up against the wall by bits of wood and surrounded by bits of cloth. On loan to the exhibition from the artist’s dealer, the piece negotiates many possible conceptual hurdles concerning objects, their reality and their makers.

This is a challenging exhibition in its scope and range, which brings together a very disparate group of artists who include Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Tuttle, Raquel Ormella, Lynda Benglis, Ti Parks, Merlin James, Peter Alwast, Natasha Kidd and Karl Wiebke. Personally, I would have found some wall texts signalling the curator’s intentions in the groupings proposed useful as well as identification labels for the individual artworks. The very limited number of identification sheets was confusing and a bit inadequate, especially if more than four people were to visit the gallery at the same time. Fortunately, I had the show to myself for most of my visit.