Metaphors of ephemeral beauty

BILL Henson's new exhibition in Sydney is discreet and evocative, eluding moral indignation without sacrificing conviction.

Untitled (2008-09) by Bill Henson, evoking the fragile beauty of humankind set against the void of surrounding mortality

TWO years after the media hysteria and intemperate political interventions of 2008, Bill Henson's new exhibition in Sydney is discreet and evocative, eluding moral indignation without sacrificing conviction or poetic intensity.

The show at Roslyn Oxley's gallery in Paddington was opened by Edmund Capon, director of the Art Gallery of NSW, on Thursday night. Studies of young women, moody and subtly erotic, alternate with landscapes of wild rocks and the sea, depicted with almost operatic sublimity, or classical ruins washed in the elegiac light of sunset.

The visual effects, though broadly familiar from earlier work, are reinterpreted through digital manipulation and realised as archival inkjet prints. The medium has distinctive pictorial qualities: not the seamless continuity of the photographic image, but the micro-divisionism of myriad minute dabs of pigment, woven together but ultimately discontinuous and resistant to absolute definition.

These qualities serve Henson's aesthetic sensibility which, contrary to the silly cliches that spring to the pens of art writers - provocation, confrontation, sensation, boundaries pushed and conventions overturned - has always been about mystery, complexity and stillness.

It as though through memory or in a dream that we see the beautiful girls around whom the other images revolve. Embraced by deep shadow, their pale bodies are luminous, like a warm marble, flecked with a tissue of greys and mauves and pinks that soften the tonal contrast with the ambient black.

Nothing could be further from the hyper-real photographs that pervade the commercial media, whose saccharine but poisonous objectification of the feminine body, much more insidious than outright pornography, is apparently invisible to the zealots who are so ready to criticise Henson.

His girls are young and vulnerable because they are natural metaphors for the kind of fragile beauty he wants to evoke, symbols of transient human experience that he sets against the deep void of nothingness or mortality that surrounds them. Eros and pathos are blended in a bittersweet equilibrium that requires a fine tact to avoid the pitfalls of exploitation on the one hand and sentimentality on the other.

None of these girls looks directly at us; they are turned away, introverted, lost in their own feelings, or drifting in some kind of ecstasy, like the girl with her head tilted back who seems a homage to Caravaggio's late Mary Magdalene; the reference is almost inevitable in an artist so drawn to chiaroscuro.

Sometimes a girl seems to be giving in to her own dreams or fantasies; in several instances she yields to the touch and handling of an unseen young man behind her. In either case, the theme recalls Henson's early series of the face of a boy engaged in autoeroticism, concentrating on the dissolution of identity in sexual ecstasy.

Here too, it is the melting away of the self in surrender and submission that interests him, while the adjacent wild landscapes and classical ruins suggest the communion with both nature and art, or the collective human experience of history, that are open to us when we transcend the ego.

Not that much of this would have been apparent to the crowd on opening night; there were too many people to see anything, what with the distinguished, the celebrities, the hopefuls and the camp-followers of art who had spent all day on their dress and hair.

Henson's work is intellectually as well as affectively rich, the different sets of images linked by thematic echoes in a way that could loosely be described as polyphonic. Thus the only full-length nude is of a girl whose attitude is based on one of the most famous female statues of antiquity, the Hellenistic Crouching Venus, known in several variations.

If this beautiful figure is the re-enactment of a sculpture, another looks almost like a real body, but is really a close-up and truncated shot of another ancient statue, the boy pulling a thorn out of his foot: the most famous version is the bronze Spinario of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, but this one is the marble copy in the British Museum.

Among the classical temples, whole or fragmentary, that he includes, Henson has several shots of the venerable Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum, with its row of monolithic granite columns. In one picture we can read the well-known inscription on the entablature: Senatus Populusque Romanus Incendio Consumptum Restituit: the Senate and people of Rome restored [this temple] when it had been destroyed by fire.

This image of destruction by fire and pious rebuilding, inscribed on an edifice once again in ruins, has its own layers of moral resonance. But given the trials of recent years, one can't help feeling it is also a wry reflection on Henson's career, and on the fire from which, figuratively speaking, his work has been rescued.