House With No Corners Phenomena
acrylic on board
56x56cm
Dairy Shed (Orbost)
acrylic on masonite
92x122cm
Ambulatory
enamel on pegboard
40x38cm
300 Mercer St (NYC)
acrylic on perspex
80x31x31cm
Abandoned House (Vic)
acrylic on perspex
90x120cm
Abandoned House (Western Australia)
acrylic on perspex
92x123cm
Abattoir (Saint Louis, Senegal)
acrylic & collage on board
91x122cm
Asbestos Shed
acrylic on perspex
60x60cm
Asylum (Fremantle)
acrylic on board
48x48cm
Bank (Snowtown)
acrylic on perspex
92x123cm
Blow-up Swimming Pool
acrylic & collage on board
26x50cm
low-up Swimming Pool
acrylic & collage on board
34x50cm
Burning House
enamel on plastic
32x19x15cm
Council Shed (Utopia)
acrylic on perspex
77.5x90cm
Detroit
acrylic on board
41x59cm
Dissection (Mysore)
acrylic on board
48x48cm
Dissection (Mysore)
acrylic on board
45x52cm
First Feel (Sydney)
acrylic on perspex
80x91cm
Harvest
acrylic on board
54x59cm
Collage
found match flints
33x33cm
Lines
acrylic on tin
51x44cm
Lines
acrylic on tin
66x69cm
One Houses
acrylic on hessian
57x49cm
Poles (Scotland)
acrylic & collage on board
33x38cm
Recreation Shed (Santa Teresa)
acrylic on perspex
80x91cm
Red Bellied Black Snake
acrylic on board
48x31cm
Red Bellied Black Snake
acrylic on glass
68x33cm
Science Dome (Canberra)
acrylic on perspex
60x120cm
Shed (Castlemaine)
acrylic on perspex
90x120cm
Shed (Kalgoorlie)
acrylic on perspex
92x123cm
Shed (Victoria)
acrylic on perspex
40x160cm
Something
wood assemblage
35x32cm
Victoria's Room
acrylic on canvas
32x42cm
Waiting Room (Dental Surgery, Castlemaine)
acrylic on board
67x88cm
Waiting Room (Dental Surgery, Castlemaine)
acrylic on board
67x88cm
Waiting Room (Radiology, Bendigo)
acrylic on board
35x33cm
Waiting Room (Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery, Bendigo)
acrylic on perspex
31x53.4cm
Wilson Parking (Melbourne)
acrylic & collage on board
30x30cm
Wilson Parking (Melbourne)
acrylic & collage on board
30x30cm
Zoo (Guangzhou)
acrylic & collage on board
91x122cm
Built Painting
If These Walls Could
Talk: Tobias Richardson
2018
by Stella Gray
‘If I wasn’t an artist I’d be a scientist’
Tobias Richardson makes art to understand the world around
him. He wants to understand and he also wants to be understood. He is a
teacher; he cares about communicating and he is good at it. He is generous with
his words and his life when I go to talk with him. We’ve only just met and he
invites me to spend an afternoon in his studio in Castlemaine in central
Victoria. He does his thing while we talk, him mostly, completely candidly and
un-self-consciously, bouncing between pictures and circling back and forth
across times and places - family history, cultural history, art history;
‘stream of consciousness’ he calls it. It’s the way he wants you to view his
work, as if from within a web of associations.
The lines that are the central visual element extend imaginatively
out into space and time, across the studio or gallery to other works and into
the past, connecting personal histories with collective memory. Familiar visual
symbols and particular buildings recur again and again, resonating throughout
TR’s body of work, often produced in series and always exhibited densely hung,
creating what he describes as a grammar or rhythm that organises the space and
the viewer’s experience, taking them beneath the buildings’ flat surfaces,
inside and out again, criss-crossing, cross-referencing.
This exhibition is made up of painted buildings, but they
are also built paintings. They are 2 dimensional but they are multi-layered,
redolent with meaning, not mere surface representations. TR is not interested
in the play of light on the building’s facades, or the way it sits in the
landscape. In fact TR’s building typically have no background at all, they
simply float in space like icons. Unadorned, stripped of extraneous detail and
boiled down to their essential elements of colour and line, TR’s built
paintings are elegant, restrained and modest. They have a quality of aesthetic
resolution that makes them deeply satisfying to contemplate, both en masse and
in isolation.
TR uses titles purposefully; sometimes descriptively (‘Shed’),
sometimes more suggestively (‘Universal Church’). A painting can’t always speak
for itself so words can be helpful. He confesses he’s more interested in art
history than art: ‘You get a lot more out of art if you know something about
the artist’. I guess that’s why he so happy to talk about his art and his life,
though he doesn’t expect anyone to find it particularly interesting. I get the
sense he just feels it would be impolite and unfriendly to keep people in the
dark. There is no pretension or affectation about TR or his work; no
mystification. His work, like him, is direct and honest, yet there is always
more than at first meets the eye.
While working as a school teacher in the central desert
community of Utopia in the late-90s TR had a revelation - the discovery that
all artists must make - of their language, their voice, the indispensable core
of their practice. For TR it was his subject. He realised that if the
Indigenous artists of Utopia could paint nothing but yams (familiar to many through
the work of their most famous exponent Emily Kame Kngwarreye), then maybe he
could say everything he wanted to say with just buildings – no mean feat for
someone with Richardson’s insatiable thirst for knowledge and experiences. TR’s
built paintings are deceptively simple, yet they bespeak a deep and thoughtful
engagement with the world and a ‘hyperactive’ curiosity about the ‘human
condition’ (though he doesn’t much like that expression), not to mention other
forms of life.
He travels extensively, undertaking residencies and research
trips all over the world. This exhibition brings together work from the past 18
months, which took him from Alice Springs, across the Nullarbor to Fremantle,
from India to Detroit, where he plans to return for an extended visit soon.
Detroit holds an obvious attraction for someone like TR – ‘ruin porn’ they call
it, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with that.
There is nothing voyeuristic about TR’s work (he is careful
to stick to public and abandoned places). It does not sensationalise or
glamourise. It is subtle, restrained, respectful, never macabre or ghoulish. It
confronts slowly and quietly.
TR likes the built environment, aesthetically, but also for
its social functions and dynamics. He is interested in places that bring people
together - civic spaces, public spaces such as zoos, hospitals, swimming pools
and particularly places of faith. He is attracted to religion. Though he points
out he is not religious, he is drawn to the construction of community – the
‘church’ as synecdoche.
He’s not particularly interested in nature, that is nature
in nature, so to speak. A natural history museum is another matter. Bones fill
his sketchbooks and his shelves. He is even filing away every one of his two
daughters’ milk teeth, meticulously documenting dates and locations, as he does
with his site research.
He is an avid collector and archivist –practices of
detachment and abstraction. He does the same thing with painting. He prefers to
paint places from a distance, with time and space to reflect, and this is what
you see when you look at a TR built painting: a view of a building from the
outside but with a knowledge of the inside. Always real places and places he
has been, seen, felt. Bricks and mortar, concrete and tin, glass, tiles and
paint, rendered with humanity and pathos.
TR doesn’t only paint buildings, he also builds things.
Sculpture is an integral aspect of his practice, and his interest in
materiality informs his ‘built paintings’. TR doesn’t paint on canvas,
preferring board, found supports such as corrugated iron and more recently
Perspex, as well as incorporating mixed media and found objects into his work,
ideally even fragments from the subject sites themselves.
Fidelity to the building’s intrinsic qualities, it’s
vernacular, even its precise colours (he keeps a catalogue of paint flakes
labelled with the place and date of collection) is primary for TR, yet his
representations are always and crucially autobiographical. For TR, this
emphasis on accuracy gives his depictions legitimacy, a concrete connection to
place.
Perspective, especially foreshortening, often presents a
challenge to the drawing student, who is instructed to avoid letting what they
know get in the way of what they see. TR breaks the rules and paints what he
knows, not merely what he sees.
Their flattened perspective paradoxically gives TR’s
buildings a tangibility that is often lost in the illusory 3 dimensionality of
‘correct’ one-point perspective - conveying the artist’s bodily experience of
the place, by contrast to the abstracting effect of conventional visual
representation.
Yet at the same time, TR is careful to create some distance
between the buildings and himself. His paintings are sometimes intimate, even
tender, but never sentimental. This tension between objective and subjective is
at the heart of TR’s work and is what makes it so appealing and compelling. TR
is a storyteller but he does not embellish the facts. He has no interest in
fantasy or romance. Reality is interesting enough, but not too exciting. After
all, as he says, ‘I like my works to be a little bit boring’.
