Pat Brassington: In Search of the Marvellous

Overview

Last year, Pat Brassington’s survey show, A rebours was exhibited at Dark Mofo in Tasmania. Curated by Juliana Engberg, the title could have been a nod to the morbid decadence of JK Huysman’s 19th-century aesthete and antihero Des Esseintes. Although similarly “against the grain,” Brassington’s style is significantly less lavish. Over the past three decades, her body of work has danced to a slightly sinister tune. Ethereal and enigmatic, her photographs seem to stand just on the brink of normalcy, gradually tipping into strangeness.

If we’re talking art history of the early 20th century, in search of the marvellous at Stills Gallery feels like a natural transition from A rebours. This exhibition takes its cue from surrealist writer Louis Aragon’s description of the marvellous as “the eruption of contradiction within the real”.

Many of the works are set on two planes, creating different levels of depth. For example, in Gifted, there’s a blurred vase and a hazy pink bouquet with a few individual flower in focus. It’s almost like a sensory division — tactile petals hovering in the foreground while the backgrounded bouquet is more vague, like a wafting perfume.

There’s a lot of doubling in this exhibition. For instance, there’s a pair of profile silhouettes in We meet in Bruges, the layered tapestry patterns of the paradoxically titled Asphalt, and the half portraits of Parasite 1 and 2. These latter works, a single face spread across two canvases, feel ever so slightly out of sync with the rest of the series. Up close, they almost look like a couple of Lichtenstein paintings. With bold outlines and rough textures, a lacy mask and a large insect appear to be stamped quite decisively on top.

On this note of doubling, it should be noted that Brassington has mastered the double-take. Comprehension comes slowly as an arm and a leg seem a little too long and a little too straight. There's also a shiny pink bow obscuring a featureless head that seems more shapeless than it should be, almost like an enlarged thumb. These works are arresting in their ambiguity, stranded somewhere between real and unreal.

in search of the marvellous dispenses with big and brash juxtapositions. It’s a subtler take on surrealism. And probably a more accurate one. There’s a sense of displaced beauty to these works, full of suggestive textures and narrative holes. With her considered compositions and deft use of colour, Brassington is restrained as always. Her style is more contemplative than communicative, making her exhibitions an inviting place to be.