Ben Taylor: Paintings. Nancy Sever Gallery, Gorman Arts Centre, 55 Ainslie Avenue, Braddon. Wednesday to Sunday 11am to 5pm. Until June 16.
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Although it has been about 15 years since we have had a solo exhibition of the work of Ben Taylor in Canberra, I think of him as a local artist living on the Monaro and working in his day job at the National Gallery of Australia.
Like his father, Michael Taylor, Ben Taylor is a very consistent artist with an erratic exhibition history. He is essentially a rural artist who draws his imagery from a country reality - an outback narrative with an outback sense of humour, sometimes black humour. However, unlike his father, Taylor is not primarily a landscape artist.
His focus is on the traces of human habitation, but frequently caught at the moment when the bush takes over and it is only the remains of habitation that we witness.
This exhibition is darker and more sombre in mood than many of his earlier shows.
In this exhibition, Taylor is the artist of rustic dilapidation that he treats as a metaphor for the drama of life. He has the gift to see that which is frequently overlooked and within this he finds a profound lyricism. Where he lives on the Monaro, there is a cluster of buildings around a disused railway station, where the tracks and the buildings have retreated from a functional existence and nature has gradually moved in and taken over.
A large, gorgeous painting, Ironbark (2019), like all of the paintings at this exhibition executed in acrylic, has a lattice-like structure of planks of wood silhouetted against a brilliant blue sky. The boards should have collapsed long ago, but rusted nails seem to stubbornly hold them together. It is a battle for survival where, despite the odds, the force of the elements and the pull of gravity, the panels withstand all and heroically hang in.
He has the rare gift through strong expressive brushstrokes to give the inanimate, weathered planks of ironbark a quality of life so that they participate in a narrative, one that is immediate and powerful.
In many of his paintings at this exhibition, including Fettler's hut (2019), there is a play between negative spaces, silhouetted forms, shadows plus just a touch of otherworldliness.
When you examine closely the painting Studs and noggins (2018), the expressive nails that dance across so many of the works here do not cast shadows, but trails of red, like blood. Possibly hunted and slain animals may have been drained here or are these nails such as at the Crucifixion that symbolically retain a mystery of sacrifice?
In another painting, Skylight (2018), a rope hangs from one of the exposed beams, reminiscent of a hangman's noose. In this rural bucolic narrative, there is a loss of innocence and echoes of sacrifice. The titles of some of the pieces - Spiders' home, Dark corner, Crossbar and the enigmatic Crate - also hint at a Gothic dimension to the imagery.
I have admired Taylor's work since I first encountered it in 1983 and, in the intervening 35 years, his art has matured, the early frivolity has largely vanished and the frame of reference has grown and expanded.
This exhibition has been curated by Peter Haynes and to him we need to be grateful for bringing Taylor's art back to prominence in Canberra.
This exhibition is darker and more sombre in mood than many of his earlier shows