Heads will roll at Archibald Prize

THE standard of finalists in this year's Archibald Prize varies from bad to excruciating, with a few merciful exceptions.

THE Archibald Prize is not really about painting at all but about celebrity and gossip and that tired word, controversy.

Unfortunately, the only thing that really deserves to be considered controversial is the quality of the painting.

The Archibald is to painting what a leagues club interior is to good design: a fundamentally vulgar amalgam of styles, each trying to impress and to grab the attention of jaded viewers.

On the whole, the standard varies from bad to excruciating, with a few merciful exceptions.

There are two main problems. The first is the big head: a variety of portrait that has evolved specifically in the context of the Archibald Prize. No one wants to hang a 2m face on their wall, but painters are afraid they won't be noticed in the visual cacophony without the benefit of scale.

The other problem, often found in combination with the first, is the reliance on photography. A classic example is the work that won the packing room prize, a portrait of Glenn A. Baker, who writes about rock music, by a woman known only by the name Nafisa.

Much worse than this, though, is the colossal face of Jacqueline Fahey by Martin Ball in airbrushed, soft-focus, photo-illusionistic style.

This hangs near another enormous head of a man in turban by Apple Yin which, as with Ball's painting, seems to belong to the world of commercial illustration.

Here, in fact, you have the main options in gigantic photorealism: as with peanut butter, you can get it smooth (such as the portrait of Fahey) or chunky. Either way, it is a superficial stylistic top dressing added to the banality of photographic likeness.

The problem of reliance on photographs can be seen in its pure form in a couple of shockers.

One is Christine O'Hagan's Kate Ceberano, a meticulously hand-painted copy of a photograph. Why would you bother? All that hard work adds nothing; and whereas a photo is a photo, a painted-up version seems like a huge black hole of meaninglessness and triviality.

Peter Smeeth's portrait of Peter FitzSimons also is dreadful. Why would you wear shorts and a red bandanna to have your portrait painted anyway?

But this picture makes clear the elementary objection to working from photographs: the legs look superficially correct, but on closer examination they are flat and inert areas of paint, not a good thing when they are given such prominence.

The right arm is simply wrong. Smeeth has not understood the foreshortening. And how could he? The photograph misleadingly flattens what the artist needs to see as three-dimensional.

More broadly, the photographic way of seeing the world can invade the painter's imagination and reduce his vision to a narrow literalism.

There are artists in this year's show who could be classified as Chinese realists, whose work seems undeniably skilful yet in reality lacks the most important things of all. The essential work of the painter is not to give a literal account of visual appearance but to translate the visual world into another order: an artificial world of forms and colours that takes on its own parallel reality. It is the distance between this parallel reality and what we think of as the real world - it cannot be too close or too far - that makes a picture enlightening, imagination-provoking or beautiful.

A good example of the deficiency of the Chinese realist style is Yi Wang's Bishop Elliott. It is workmanlike, yet there is not one passage of paint that is visually interesting. The dead literalness of the picture is not compensated by the compositional conceit of the bishop with his cat.

Paul Newton's self-portrait, apart from being far too big, also reveals the internalisation of a photographic way of seeing.

Presumably it is done from life, yet it is as visually uninteresting as a snapshot. The paint is used not to engage with the world of experience but to reproduce passively some idea of visual reality that is already predetermined.

He might have thought more about composition, too - about setting the figure in space - and this would have given him a much better chance of impressing his theme on us, "the dark night of the soul".

One of the few works to stand out on a first inspection for its pictorial qualities is Rodney Pople's portrait of Stelarc - though it's a shame about the two side panels - and Pople's work employs photographic technology.

Very few pictures here are really paintings at all, in the sense of having been really thought out in that medium, rather than simply copied from photographs.

One of the rare examples of painterly thinking is Robert Malherbe's portrait of Luke Sciberras. It stands out from almost everything else around it in the way it is visibly done from life - a breath of fresh air in itself - and the way that the painter has created it in a limited palette.

Colours are used decisively and artificially to produce harmonies and a colour pattern, instead of the appalling point-by-point colour matching of the nearby portrait of Ceberano, which looks as if it were done by a machine, and indeed was since the artist is imitating the camera.

Other pictures that are real paintings include McLean Edwards's Tim Storrier, though it is less good a likeness than Malherbe's picture, and Kevin Connor's rather retiring self-portrait.

Robert Hannaford is a real painter too, although this year's portrait of Malcolm Fraser is disappointing: the choice of a pink and yellow colour scheme is inexplicable, distracting and does a disservice to the sitter.

One could add Alexander McKenzie's Andrew Upton, with its amiable conceit of a rowing boat. Paul Ryan's Danie Mellor is a real painting, too, although on the generic borderline between portrait and landscape.

Victor Rubin's two paintings of John Olsen are not particularly good portraits and they are oversized, but at least they are conceived as paintings.

Greg Somers's self-portrait is a rather dull picture, but its title introduces a rare touch of wit: Self-Portrait with the Picture of Dory in Grey.

Of course, the big question is: Who will be the winner? If the matter were decided on artistic quality, it would be Malherbe. The competition is so feeble.

But if you try to think like the judges, which is to say to match size and impact and potential for publicity with - if possible - some artistic merit, you would have to say Craig Ruddy's Warwick Thornton.

It is a reasonably good portrait, though much too big and photographic in style, camouflaged by an artificial palette.

It is of the Aboriginal filmmaker, which is a promising subject; and who knows, the fact it's painted on a light box may even prove controversial.

The Archibald Prize opens at the Art Gallery of NSW on March 27.