John Olsen called this artist’s Archibald win the worst decision he’d seen. But it didn’t stop him

Within minutes of Mitch Cairns winning the Archibald Prize in 2017, with an abstract portrait of his wife and fellow artist Agatha Gothe-Snape, the grandfather of NSW artists, John Olsen, trashed Cairns’ breakthrough as “the worst decision I’ve ever seen”.

Olsen was unfamiliar with Cairns’ angular paintings and, seeing the distorted woman on a red-orange background on his TV at home, declared the composition flat and derivative.

It was a richly ironic call from the pioneering experimental artist, who died in 2023 and who decades earlier had led a vociferous campaign demanding the Archibald judges of the time adopt more modern tastes.

It was also a call made in haste that Olsen’s son, art dealer Tim Olsen, now says his father regretted. “Dad actually came to admire Mitch’s work,” the younger Olsen says.

Mitch Cairns in 2017 with his Archibald-winning portrait of wife and artist Agatha Gothe-Snape.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Being dumped on from such a great height during the crowning achievement of his 33 years, by a revered artist half a century his senior, was for Cairns a blistering entry to art fame. Judging by his output since, it didn’t slow him down.

In 2021 Cairns was selected to show in Sydney’s biennial exhibition of new Australian art The National, the 2022 Adelaide Biennale, and in 2023’s The Skin, a prestigious group show at Monash University Museum of Art. He has continued producing new works for exhibitions at his Sydney gallery The Commercial.

Now Cairns has returned to the home of the Archibald for an intimate solo exhibition, the latest iteration of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Contemporary Projects series where NSW-based artists are invited to make a new body of work for display in a modest gallery within the new Sydney Modern building.

Restless Legs consists of eight abstract paintings, about the same number of text-based metal works and a six-metre-long repurposed power pole, running through the middle of the gallery, that ties the works together but also allows visitors an opportunity to sit and contemplate.

It’s a curatorial composition Cairns has played with before; his display for The National at Carriageworks paired paintings with text works and featured an outsized rosewood chair, although that one was not for sitting on.

Mitch Cairns’ Self-portrait as a pair of restless legs, 2024, oil on linen.Credit: Mitch Cairns, courtesy of The Commercial

At Carriageworks, Cairns’ artworks were hemmed by a specially installed brick wall that added a homely, almost domestic vibe to the display. The wall was also a nod to Cairns’ family origins: his father was a bricklayer, and the artist has at times supported himself by getting on the tools with his dad.

Restless Legs also features a paternal nod in that the power-pole work Seed is held in place with steel supports made in collaboration with Cairns’ father-in-law, renowned sculptor Michael Snape. The steel supports echo the wall-mounted blackened bronze plates interspersed among the paintings.

The plates riff on printers’ plates but are heavy with introspective darkness, containing sparse lines of text that demand a considerable effort from the reader due to the letters being rendered in relief – that is, sunk into the material.

Just as the words begin to make sense, they contort or disappear entirely, like an early computer on the blink. If they were inked, they’d create an ungainly smudge, so the joke is clearly on us.

Cairns is less interested in creating narrative than he is with using language as a series of visual cues, which gives him a chance to be playful, his words tumbling together.

His paintings are similarly intuitive, and the first one, Dislocated E or A vowel, suggests a distorted Pac-Man poised for a voracious, victorious spree.

Dislocated E or A vowel, 2024, oil on linen.Credit: Courtesy of The Commercial

John Olsen learned the hard way that Cairns’ paintings are really not best experienced via television. He overlays geometrical sketches on blank linen canvases with layers of lightly applied oil paint that appears to have been feathered to create almost pixelated pictures that are at once both firmly anchored and adrift.

The Pac-Man, for example, is sharply defined but also afloat amid clouds, a clash of static and motion that creates a sense of still amid urgency.

The dirty yellow hue also heralds a shift in colour palette for the artist from bolder hues to a greater reliance on duskier pinks, purples and blues. Even the ever-present orange-red that made its presence strongly felt in the Archibald win has been largely replaced by a deeper red in ERATO, a close-up of a contorted hand grasping a tiny lyre.

The mix of interiors and exteriors reveals he’s inspired by snatches of home life and images seen around his neighbourhood, streets walked with his primary-school-aged son.

9-5 literally features the figures 9 and 5, evoking the salaryman’s working day, some outsized cigarettes and those clouds again, or are they puffs of smoke?

ERATO, 2024, oil on linen.Credit: Courtesy of The Commercial

The clouds are again evident in Self-portrait as a pair of restless legs, all angles and geometry evocative of the Port Kembla copper smelter where the copper plates may have originated from.

The exhibition title Restless Legs, lifted from the self-portrait, alludes to the sensation the artist sometimes feels when reading in bed, yet it is in the interior composition Life-like that he’s depicted fluttering books alongside what might be a chess piece.

Where Cairns’ Archibald portrait was celebrated for its striking geometry that paid homage to Matisse, the flashes of red, deployment of digits, outsized inanimate objects and experiments with motion in this collection evoke the Australian artistic traditions of John Brack in form, and possibly Howard Arkley in the pixelated painting style.

Sydney artists have long complained that their local gallery has looked too far afield when deciding who to show, but the Sydney Modern extension now offers more space to include modest exhibitions like this.

Cairns is the latest local to benefit from the Contemporary Projects series, previous artists being Jelena Telecki, Emily Hunt and Leyla Stevens. Juanita McLauchlan will follow Cairns.

In some ways, Cairns was an obvious choice. In 2012 he received the gallery’s prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, which allowed him to spend time in Paris – an anointment of future success if ever there was.

Coupled with the Archibald win bestowed by the gallery’s trustees, he’s firmly within the institution’s bosom. It’s an enviable place to be but, then again, nothing in the art world can be taken for granted.

Restless Legs is on at the Art Gallery of NSW until June 9.

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