Fantauzzo’s new gallery – and the hidden work Asher Keddie calls ‘heartbreaking’

This story is part of the June 7 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

“LET’S GO, BITCHES!” It’s not exactly what I expect to hear in a fine-art studio at 6.47am, but that’s what Vincent Fantauzzo roars on this chilly April morning.

We’re upstairs, above the photorealist portrait painter’s lavish new Chapel Street exhibition space in swanky South Yarra, surrounded by oil paints, easels, turps and brushes. The place is filled with boy-toys, too, from a pool table to a black Ducati Scrambler. Not to mention a heavy bag and speed ball for boxing, and a bunch of middle-aged men gloving up.

Welcome to “Fight Club” – a twice-weekly physical and mental health session Fantauzzo, 48, hosts for a crew of his well-to-do and ne’er-do-well mates. Finance bros jab at soccer dads. A TV executive tangles with a tradie. Fantauzzo bonds easily with all types, which is also clear from the looming portraits of his famous friends.

Smiling down on us are actors (Guy Pearce and Hugh Jackman), chefs (Neil Perry and Shannon Bennett), athletes (Oscar Piastri and Luc Longley) as well as movers and shakers like Hollywood producer Bruna Papandrea, his late mate, music impresario Michael Gudinski, and his wife, the actor Asher Keddie.

Right now he’s finishing a likeness of the rapper Ice Cube, which explains the Tupac playlist booming while the guys spar and sweat. Fantauzzo steps them through footwork and combinations – “Left uppercut, right cross!” – while coaching technique: “Duck and weave, on your toes!” And oh, how they adore him – all sharing a profound platonic attachment to the painter.

“It was love at first sight,” huffs one bulky bloke. “Plain and simple.”

“Vinnie’s not some friend,” explains another. “He’s my brother.”

A sagacious and bearded fellow – a respected rabbi, actually – sums up the group sentiment: “He’s a guru,” he says, nodding. “A modern guru.”

An hour later, I sit alone with Fantauzzo on a leather couch under a collection of abstracts he isn’t yet ready for the world to see (more on that later), but we’re talking about one of his figurative works downstairs – a child sitting on a kitchen floor, shrouded in malevolent pink mist. It’s a self-portrait from his hardscrabble beginnings, in the bitumen backblocks of suburban Broadmeadows. Like a bad dream, Fantauzzo murmurs, too vivid to shake. “But it’s not a dream,” he adds, features falling, face flushed. Gulping deep breaths now, his tears stream without warning. “It’s like I wake up and it’s real and I’m stuck in this situation and can’t get out. I’m running but it’s keeping up with me. I’m helpless. That’s what childhood felt like to me.”

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I first met Fantauzzo in 2011, when I profiled him for The Age Melbourne Magazine. He was 34, so the headline wrote itself: “Portrait of the young man as an artist.” He was nervous then, skittish almost, having only just begun telling people his tale.

Fantauzzo in his new gallery.Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen

Now, he stands before me in his own gallery, giving a book talk about his recent rollicking, ghostwritten memoir, Unveiled. He’s a generous speaker, with funny practised lines I’ve heard before. “I promised Asher I wouldn’t get drunk or swear,” he says, tipping back the bubbles, “so I’ve already f---ed up on both counts.”

Fantauzzo’s bio has also been the subject of not one but two Australian Story episodes, so he gives his audience the crib-notes version. He started sketching as a kid, often on the walls of the Melbourne commission homes the family bounced between. The middle child of five, Vincent had a fractious and fraught relationship with his late Italian father, maintains a playful yet distant connection with his Irish mother and keeps his siblings at a slight remove.

Painting a perfect likeness was second nature, and still feels that way with brush in hand. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘F---, this is great’, and I’m thrilled at how easily it comes out. It’s just this flow of positivity,” he says. “I get to make something out of nothing. It makes me feel proud, and good.”

That’s a reference to the many things that made him feel bad – that make him weep in front of strangers at book talks. Fantauzzo was sexually abused briefly and also, separately, physically abused. He took up boxing – learning from Jack Rennie, one-time trainer to Lionel Rose – and developed a dangerous protective streak.

Nic Cester, frontman for rock band Jet, thinks of Fantauzzo as a tender empath – “He can see right into your soul” – except when he’s in the ring. “His capacity to commit violence is quite astounding,” says Cester, who was immortalised by Fantauzzo in a Melbourne alley in 2017. “I’ve never met anyone with that juxtaposition or bandwidth.”

That masculine side came in handy one morning after Christmas last year, when Keddie saw a man pushing Fantauzzo’s motorbike out of their driveway in Elwood and screamed. Fantauzzo leapt out of bed, chased the intruder and won the fight to restrain him for the police. “Anyone would find that invasive, terrifying, violating, but Vincent’s not lacking in courage. It triggered in him a pretty dark place,” says Keddie. “Don’t come into our home.”

Fantauzzo with actor wife Asher Keddie.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Childhood friend Matthew Pillios, 46, now a director at luxury realtor Kay & Burton, witnessed the origin of this righteous side – on the playground. Pillios was 15 and new to Buckley Park High School in Essendon, and was being bullied without mercy. (He’s now a Fight Club devotee.) “I was quite small, and got cornered once by three guys. They were taking my lunch, and Vince came in from nowhere with a flying kick, then stood in front of them – ‘Leave him alone!’ – even though I’d only just met him,” Pillios says. “He had a ponytail – thought he was Steven Seagal – and he looked after me. I’ll never forget that.”

Fantauzzo’s memoir is filled with stories of conflict and transgression – the year he ran a marijuana grow-house or the time he stole a car – but he doesn’t reminisce fondly. “I learnt to live that way through being abused myself,” he explains. “I’d have those fights then walk away and hide, go across the street to the park over the road, and just sit crying.”

He was also coping with extreme undiagnosed dyslexia and still finds it difficult to read and write. During our time together he often searches the web by asking Siri and uses his iPhone’s Speak Screen function to have results read aloud. Neither of those existed in the 1990s, when he got into a bachelor of fine art at RMIT using forged transcripts.

“My impression of Vincent was a young artist who was very serious about his work,” says his third-year painting teacher, Professor David Thomas. “He was always in the studio, from morning until evening, painting away.” Thomas remembers a large work with three figures – one standing by a window, one sitting on a bed, and one lying on the floor – representing the last moments of a friend who had died by suicide. “We started talking about other things, and that was the first clue that Vincent was having trouble with the art history part of the program. He needed to be honest about what was happening.”

Fantauzzo was paying other students to write his essays, until one of them gave him a plagiarised paper to submit. Forgiving lecturers put his welfare first, encouraging him to get tested for learning difficulties. Once confirmed, the university offered him special consideration and a disability liaison. He finished his degree, then a master’s and a residency, followed by a 2006 sold-out solo show at Dianne Tanzer’s gallery in Fitzroy. He now embraces his neurobiological condition.

“You get brain cancer – you’re the icon for brain cancer. You have dyslexia – you’re its new spokesman. I’m now ‘the dyslexia guy’,” Fantauzzo says, throwing up his hands. “But I’m OK with that.”

His processing issues, however, are more pervasive and crippling – his working memory a constant tangle of crossed wires and cognitive misfires. Just this week he lost two motorbike keys and the house keys, accidentally locking out his boys, Luca, 15 (from his first marriage) and Valentino, 10 (his son with Keddie). He lost his wallet once, too. And missed two appointments, despite Keddie walking him through his diary every morning and sending reminders every day.

“The chaos for him is real,” she says. “It challenges him so much, and he feels great shame about that. But the loss of time, in particular, he finds debilitating.”

Fantauzzo with wife Asher Keddie and sons Luca (left) and Valentino.

And yet he found his niche, which is connecting with people. He’s emotionally intelligent – gregarious and light-hearted – and doesn’t do small talk. “He asks for something deeper,” Keddie says. “Immediately.”

He makes himself swiftly familiar to me, too, with thoughtful, intimate gestures. When we have lunch at a little Italian joint, my Chinotto arrives, and he reaches across the table, takes my can without asking and pours it into my glass. When we’re discussing his extensive injury history – thanks to boxing bouts, BMX spills, ju-jitsu hits and motorbike crashes – he places my hand inside the neck of his T-shirt and runs my thumb along the skin over his collarbone, so I can feel the plate and screws for myself. “That’s a shitty operation,” he says, smiling. “It’s still painful.”

He began working in the early noughties by producing a slew of masterful high-profile portraits, whether of the model Chanel Iman, or the boxer Lennox Lewis, or the musician Tim Rogers. Rogers felt it unusual to be asked to sit for a painting, which became an Archibald Prize finalist, but Fantauzzo asked the You Am I frontman to pose with his daughter, Ruby. Rogers couldn’t resist creating a filial memento – or the young painter’s charm.

“It doesn’t hurt that he has big eyes like a beautiful moo-cow – you can fall into them and it’s like swimming in a pond in the rain,” Rogers says. “For him to be striving to capture someone else’s face – particularly someone with my Dickensian villain visage – was gravitational.”

The pair met through a common friend, hip-hop singer N’fa of 1200 Techniques, which is often how it goes for Fantauzzo. Connections beget collaborations. It was N’fa who introduced Fantauzzo to Heath Ledger, who became the subject of a stunning 2007 portrait completed in the days before the death of the young actor, which won the People’s Choice – the first of four – in the 2008 Archibald Prize.

He was, he admits, obsessed with landing that top gong for years, but after portraits of Michael Gudinski and Australian of the Year Neale Daniher failed to make the list of finalists, Fantauzzo eventually gave up. “Someone has a problem with me,” he guesses. “I hope there’s a changing of the guard.”

Fantauzzo’s 2007 portrait of late actor Heath Ledger.Credit: 20081013

More big names became big faces under his brush. He met celebrity chef Matt Moran at The Ivy in Sydney in 2010, exchanged numbers, and was soon bombarding him with texts and offering to show him around Melbourne. “I spent a day with him,” says Moran, “and at the end of the day, I just knew we were going to be friends for life. I’d never met anyone like him before. And then I saw his work, which I can’t fathom. I can cook a steak and run a business, but he’s got actual talent.”

Yet critics are often unkind, prompting headlines like “Portrait of modern mediocrity” or characterisations of his art as being “what lip-syncing is to singing”. His 2011 portrait of Moran – surrounded by meat at a butcher’s – won the Packing Room Prize at the Archibalds but was also described as “repellent”, with most observers preferring another meat-themed portrait from the finalists that year: Tasmanian artist Geoff Dyer’s blood-and-guts rendering of MONA founder David Walsh.

Coincidentally, Walsh has also sat for Fantauzzo and seems perfectly positioned to compare the pair. “The portraits? Geoff’s is the inner me. Vincent’s is how the world sees me,” says Walsh. “The artists? If they were loaves of bread, Vincent would be a grainy white loaf, Geoff would be sourdough.”

Fantauzzo’s in good company copping the odd sharp elbow. William Dargie won the Archibald more than anyone else (eight times), yet saw his final winner – a 1956 portrait of Albert Namatjira – lambasted as effete and with “a general air of having nothing to say”. Art darling Ben Quilty’s portrait of Margaret Olley – also an Archibald winner – was slammed as being “vulgar, meretricious and gimmicky”.

Notable Australian art critic Quentin Sprague is blunt about Fantauzzo’s paintings. “They’re terrible,” he says flatly, “but some art is critic-proof. Power to him.”

Sprague says Fantauzzo reminds him of the Australian installation artist Rone (Tyrone Wright), who blends murals and soundscapes in decaying urban spaces. “It’s so popular that it doesn’t matter,” he says. “Street art is very popular, too, but 90 per cent of it is absolutely horrible.”

Fantauzzo’s Matt Moran Archibald entry won the 2011 Packing Room Prize.

Fantauzzo won’t change. He makes his living much like the salaried court painters of the Renaissance, part of a great tradition and continuum in art. He often barters for his services, trading several paintings for motorbikes. The careworn Volvo parked out front was a direct swap for a sketch. But his private commissions command solid prices.

“A poster-size drawing, maybe $40,000,” he says. “That big oil painting there of Jay Malkoun – the Comancheros bikie boss – would be about $150,000. But it was an exchange, too. He gave me a Harley-Davidson.”

Beyond the famous and infamous, his clients include many of Australia’s wealthiest people. When I visit his studio, one of them – Rodney Smorgon, heir to a billion-dollar family steel fortune – stops by for a chat, and Fantauzzo wraps him in a bear hug.

“Hey chap!” Fantauzzo cries. “What’s up?”

If that kind of patronage isn’t enough to impress, consider the guest of honour at his February gallery opening and memoir launch: Lachlan Murdoch. They met at the Phillip Island MotoGP last year, connecting over their bikes and their boys.

“I don’t know about his politics. I don’t care about his money. I just saw a guy with his kid,” says Fantauzzo. “With everything going on in his life, that just looked like a priority. Now we text silly pictures of ourselves on motorbikes with our kids.”

It’s trademark Fantauzzo to connect with someone over their children. During his recent book talk, he choked up about his distant and dysfunctional relationship with his dad, laying bare the pain. “When the people you want to love you most reject you,” he says, trembling, “it’s the worst rejection you can feel.”

He’s not about to repeat the cycle with his own brood either, offering his sons continuous buoyancy and affection. “No one draws breath in this house,” says Keddie, laughing. “What it looks like is a constant flow of communication. Kicking a ball in the backyard. Dancing in the kitchen. Wrestling on the floor is literally a nightly thing. Life is about play for Vincent.”

He also fills gaps in his own experience through father-brother figures, whether Rennie or Gudinski, or just older male mates like Baz Luhrmann, 62, who can teach, encourage and guide. “Vinnie’s that guy who feeds on approval,” says Moran, 56. “You look at his upbringing – the put-downs his whole life. He’s confident and talented and so beautiful, but he still lacks that confidence, which is kinda sad.”

Fantauzzo likes to point out that we celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, but there should be an Other’s Day, too. One of those others would be his pal and partner in the gallery, billionaire National Basketball League owner Larry Kestelman, 58. They met at a party more than a decade ago, and Kestelman began commissioning collections – but also talking about his future, from these new digs to releasing limited-edition prints.

Fantauzzo with pal and partner in his new South Yarra gallery, National Basketball League owner Larry Kestelman.

“As someone who had a chip on his shoulder, Vince struggled to reconcile commerciality and the art world, but he’s done that,” says Kestelman. “He’s got a new level of respect for the business of art.”

For many years, Fantauzzo was preoccupied with the perception – real or imagined – that he was a “sellout”. Not any more. On the table between us there’s a big book on Andy Warhol, an artist who never blushed at such aspersions. “Making money is art – and working is art,” Warhol once said. “And good business is the best art.”

Fantauzzo is pragmatic. He grew up in “Shitsville” but prefers sending his kids to good schools and flying business class. “I’ve been poor – I’m not scared of it – but why wouldn’t I like nice things? Am I not allowed?” he asks. “The star athlete, the gun barrister, the celebrity chef – they’re not sellouts, but I am?”

He posits that the average person could name ‘five criminals, five chefs, five footy players’ – but not five contemporary Australian artists.

Celebrity is the other way people put down what he does, writing him off as someone who manipulates media by painting only those with a platform. He shrugs. Goya painted both commoners and kings. Whether Fantauzzo’s painting prostitutes in Hong Kong, or Formula 1 racer Oscar Piastri in Melbourne, he lives for the encounter. He shares with me an email from Piastri’s mother, thanking him for the “breathtaking” diptych of her son. “Oscar is a man of few words, but he couldn’t stop talking about you,” she wrote. “I can’t remember anyone having such an impact on him, but after meeting you it all made sense.”

Fantauzzo beams: “Isn’t that amazing? That’s worth everything.”

If anything, he wants to lean into his notoriety, perhaps with a TV show capturing every subject-artist interaction. Go for a drive with Piastri, do a portrait. Train with Conor McGregor before a UFC fight, do a portrait. “The portrait is just the means,” he says. “The end is getting to know someone.”

All of it serves the greater project, which is making art cool. Fantauzzo posits that if he stopped a random person on the street, they couldn’t name five contemporary Australian artists. No way. “You can name five criminals, five chefs, five footy players. We all start out drawing as kids – we all begin as artists – so what happens? I’d like to Jamie Oliver the art world.”

He might be the man to do it, too. Average punters can see his skill for themselves, but also feel comfortable knowing he isn’t some avant-garde arsehole trying to make them feel dumb.

He’ll never give up portraiture, but does dream of a parallel career creating abstracts. That’s something he started doing recently. The series sits along one wall in his studio – blockish pastels overlaid with curling, twirling strands of script. Fantauzzo used to try writing in cursive as a child but couldn’t – these indecipherable lines are a tribute to his desperate pantomime squiggles.

“It’s heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time,” says Keddie. “I don’t think showing them will be far away.”

He might opt for a soft debut overseas somewhere, away from local scrutiny. His insecurity goes back to university, when everything felt over-articulated. “Art’s a bit like wine: you can talk it up or just appreciate the flavour. But I didn’t know how to talk about art or defend myself, so I just hid all my abstract works. I don’t want to be embarrassed any more.”

One of the quotes that was taught to him in art school came from Swiss abstract artist Helmut Federle: “What you see is who you are.” It probably pays to think on that when thinking about Fantauzzo, and all the decisions he makes in his work, from finding subjects to selecting the photo he’ll use as his reference.

“Should I choose a smile? Or should it be straight-faced? Maybe looking into the distance?” he asks. “Making that choice is the hardest thing. Once I start painting, it’s happy land.”

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