Review: Tim Thatcher and Judy Grace

Tim Thatcher and Judy Grace at Snowhite

The proposition offered in the Snowhite show of Unitec 2004 Bachelor of Design Painting Graduates Tim Thatcher and Judy Grace suggested that an encompassing, sympathetic vision is necessary for understanding contemporary painting. The positioning of these formally differing artists within the same gallery was accompanied by the transcript of a discussion between the two, regarding their respective formal and subjective interests and influences. The dichotomy inherent was underscored by the unofficial title of the show; ‘Uncertainty comes between two points.’

Thatcher’s fantastical landscapes are analogous to the modern form of fragmentary, poetic fiction. In Thatcher’s work’s we witness an evolving (or devolving) cast of miscreants, troopers, animals, innocents and savages in colonial landscapes seemingly put through a cultural mulcher of events, technologies, theories and suppositions. At first glance it could be tempting to draw comparisons between Thatcher with the work of Dargher or Thek and more recently Tony De Latour, Brad Kalhamer and Jockum Nordstrom. The most appropriate method to understand Thatcher’s work is not to consider this kind of painting solely as a historical genre however but rather instead as endemic and besides, ruptured.

Thatcher’s paintings with their narrative content spanning wide terrain, together with his coalition with Grace in this show, were suggestive that Ortega’s Modernism1 remains apropos of contemporary painting, principally due to the concern with idea as subject. Ortega’s 1925 proposition for ‘The Dehumanization of Art’ for instance was concerned primarily with the realization of ideas as a separation from their representative appearance. A simple proposition albeit a deceptively wide ranging, multileveled theory and in this case primary to Thatcher and Grace’s exhibition concept.

Judy Grace’s abstract works offered a counterpoint to Thatcher’s narrative landscapes, bearing similarities to the classic abstractions of the Greenbergian abstract formalists of the 50’s and 60’s. Grace’s pairing with Thatcher (whether intentionally or not) aggressively asserted a contrary position to the formalist pedagogy which would have typified, even until recent times, an assessment of Grace’s style of painting. As such, Grace’s explorations in colour harmony and composition were positioned not as naive formalist zeitgeist, but more like a conscious contemporary realization of Husserlian Phenomenology and not least of all, the pleasure of hands-on experimentation.

As a conceptual proposition presenting a paradox or dichotomy and also as a show composed of two individual artists, ‘Uncertainty comes between two points’ generously offered an opportunity for the viewer to make connections via their own interpretive reading, based on an indexical juxtaposition of common knowledge related (for instance) to both formalist abstraction and narrative painting. This is similar to a demand for interpretation raised by Charles Harrison in a 2001 essay entitled ‘Conceptual Art and It’s Criticism.’ Harrison notes; ‘I suggest that the demand for readings that seek to make the work intelligible is still instinct in those examples of Conceptual Art that have remained interesting. That demand should not now be replaced or forgotten in the name of an assumed authenticity. . . The suppressed beholders have to exert themselves.’ It is easily foreseeable that a didactic approach to understanding modern art practices should find resistance among artists who justifiably resist most categorization. But at some point, a discursive thread must surely be offered to the viewer, as Harrison notes. Their generous proposition therefore made the show a success for both artists, conceptually and as a forum to exhibit the freedom and potential of paint media.

M.J. Kjarr