Portrait of modern mediocrity

VISUAL ART: The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize. State Library of NSW, Sydney. Until June 26.

VISUAL ART: The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize. State Library of NSW, Sydney. Until June 26.

THE Doug Moran prize is proof that even in Sydney money is not quite enough to buy prestige. Although worth three times more than the Archibald, it attracts nothing like the same attention or interest.

The finalists, too, seem to include a lot more amateurs, the kind of people who tell us in their statements that they have been painting all their lives and insist they have won many awards and are represented in all sorts of collections, as though that made up for the less than convincing pictures on the walls.

Particularly awful are the kinds of painters who assure you that they are working in the tradition of the old masters, when they really look as if they have come from a school of commercial illustration. Thus V.R. Morrison's painting of her husband is supposedly inspired by what she refers to as classical painting, but no great or even mediocre painter from the Renaissance to the 19th century worked in anything like this nauseatingly airbrushed and photographic manner.

Similarly, there is a painter quaintly named Adam James K, who claims to have been studying Renaissance painting techniques in the US for 13 years. Perhaps he was looking in the wrong place. And as for the subject, K has managed to represent Louis Nowra, the Kings Cross playwright, as though in the process of metamorphosing into Bob Hawke. It's the kind of likeness that almost looks like its subject but falls short of what is most essential.

A lot of work is simply plodding, such as Andrew Forsythe's The Read Twins: the picture demonstrates a certain workmanlike ability, but the painting is heavy-handed, crudely factual like a pair of police mugshots. There is no interest in the composition or the handling of light, let alone subtlety in the apprehension of the personalities. The features are blocked out in a competent but simplistic way, again like a commercial illustrator. Is there really nothing more interesting to these women than their rather cranky expressions?

Kristin Headlam's portrait of Max Riebl is rather better and gives some inkling of the subject's inner life. But the white background and the relentlessly platitudinous naturalism of the features detract from what could have been a better picture; it looks as if it has been painted under fluorescent lighting in a waiting room somewhere, conditions antithetical to any sense of intimacy. She should try the same thing in a real place, with a darker background, softer directional lighting and a longer view including the upper torso and arms.

Matthew Butterworth's portrait of his wife, although the actual pose is no doubt based on a photograph, is informed with enough knowledge of the subject and sympathetic engagement to make it arresting; its small scale adds to the impression of intensity that he succeeds in evoking.

There are some well-known and respectable artists in the show, including Nicholas Harding, with a portrait of his dealer Rex Irwin sitting in an uncharacteristic state of undress on a rocky ledge at Maroubra beach, and Robert Hannaford, with a sketch portrait of Nadia. And among the less reputable, there are a few of the usual suspects, too tiresome to mention, with the usual dead-end styles, from photorealism to tortured semi-abstraction.

The prize was awarded to Vincent Fantauzzo, who also won the Packing Room prize at this year's Archibald with a photorealistic picture of Matt Moran, and has had other glossy pop works in recent Archibald shows including, a couple of years ago, an enormous and cloyingly sentimental portrait of the young Aboriginal boy in Baz Luhrmann's film Australia. This time it's a massive photographic-style close-up of Luhrmann himself with his face in his hands, the kind of thing that is to painting as lip-syncing is to singing.

It is unfortunate that the judges have lent Fantauzzo such credibility as is theirs to give, and even more regrettable that he will now be a judge next year.

The photographs are generally of a better standard than the paintings, although too many rely on the sentimental appeal of subject matter, when a good photograph requires subject and form to be indissociably integrated. The winner, by Jack Atley, is a good candidate in this regard - not only compositionally resolved but beautifully balanced in the arrangement of light and shade - although the subject of a little girl with a rare disease is so painful that it tends to draw the attention away from the aesthetic synthesis.

From this point of view, Elizabeth Looker's 8 Months and on the Porch is a more harmonious balance: the unselfconscious but spontaneously joyful stretching of the naked pregnant body captured and abstracted at the same time by the strong tonal contrasts of the black and white image, sympathy and detachment in a happy equilibrium.