RICHARD LEWER

As I stepped out into the bright sunlight
20 November - 7 December 2007

Richard Lewer has recently received numerous awards and residencies. He has just been invited to become the artist in residence at The McCahon House, Titirangi, which he will take up in September 2008, as well as being awarded a two year studio residency at Gertrude Street Studios, in Melbourne.

In September he was short-listed for the inaugural $100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize, the winner of which will be announced in Melbourne in February 2008 at the Ian Potter Museum.

These new paintings, a response to a recent trip to his hometown of Hamilton for a family funeral, were produced at Gertrude Street Studios, Melbourne in 2007.

The title, As I stepped out into the bright sunlight... is the opening line of S.E. Hinton's classic 1967 novel, The Outsiders, a literary 'West Side Story" exploring teenage rivalry, class conflict and the existential angst specific to 14 year old boys.

In typically Lewer fashion, the paintings contain overlapping narratives that reference key influences in the artist's life: his maternal grandmother, Nell; his upbringing within the Catholic Church; the complexities of family and his obsession with sport - represented by a selection of rugby greats - the super-heroes of his Hamilton childhood.

Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ
enamel on canvas 66 x 66 cm

In the catalogue essay that accompanies the show, Melbourne based curator Emily Cormack writes:

Employing this unwieldy domestic material Lewer’s depiction of his grandmother’s funeral are confrontingly brusque – giving the viewer unrestricted access to the sadness and intensity of this event.

He pauses the moment that the hearse pulls away from the church and gives us a gods-eye view of the last goodbye as the coffin is cranked into the soil. Impasto pinks signify humans who have been reduced to bare impulse and intensity.

The figures in both the funeral scenes and the rugby player portraits seem to have been wrestled into form. They are slippery and combatant, with the family groupings, and narrative scenes isolated on planes of common house paint cream. [Lewer] describes how painting these moments was an unpredictable, uncontrollable process – with the paint behaving willfully and Lewer unwilling to ebb this flow.

The resulting blistered and wrinkled surface of Lewer’s enamel paintings both mocks and affirms the futility of any attempt to capture these momentary intensities of self and place. Making what is probably the saddest and most wonderful work in this series - Lewer’s tender portrait of his grandmother – a loving talisman to faith and optimism in the face of perpetuity and growing up.

A full colour catalogue is available from the gallery.

A. Haden
enamel on canvas 30 x 25 cm

M. Mexted
enamel on canvas 30 x 25 cm