Dystopian cities at heart of Rick Amor’s Painting Silence show

Rick Amor: Painting SilenceHamilton Art Gallery to 4 March

Waiting (2016), by Rick Amor.

When Aristotle said that man was a political animal, he meant that our distinctive characteristic as a species is to live together in cities: and the Greek for city, polis, has given us a whole family of derivatives, from politics and politician to policy, police and even polite.

Our relationship to the city is mutually ­defining: the city is composed of individuals, but the individuals are shaped by their role within the collective order, especially when that order emphasises the mutual responsibility and commitment of all its members. As Pericles said, Athenians considered a man who took an interest in public affairs not as a busybody but as a good citizen.

The physical form and structure of a city should reflect this social system. Athens had spaces for the assembly of citizens and the law courts, as well as temples and sacred precincts, gymnasiums and stadiums, and perhaps above all the agora, the market centre where citizens spent much of their time informally mingling and talking.

Many cities have grown organically, beginning from the most practical necessities such as ­access to resources and defence, but new and planned cities, since antiquity, have been designed to mirror the ideal functioning of the polis in their physical layout and the flow of movement between civic spaces. The well-­designed city should embody the values of the community and make its citizens feel part of a larger whole.

In Australia, Adelaide was laid out on an ideal plan going back to Hellenistic times, and in the famous painting of an ideal city ­attributed to the circle of Piero della Francesca, the ethos of the community is expressed in open and ­inviting spaces, a human scale and the balance of diversity and congruity. It is an environment designed for order, tolerance and civil harmony.

To ponder the nature of the ideal city for a moment is to see more clearly what Rick Amor is doing in his powerful and even haunting ­images of a very different and dystopian urban environment. For these pictures do not reflect a world in which people can feel free, confident or in charge of their own lives: these are ­cities not of citizens but of visitors at best, and of ­fugitives, almost prisoners in the most sinister cases. The urban environment is dark, overbearing and unintelligible.

Amor’s figures are sparse, generally isolated, small and often vulnerable. Sometimes they are mere silhouettes in a corner of the composition, reminders that there is some human ­subject to witness these scenes of desolation or of strangeness. They seldom have identifiable features or expressions, except where they are self-­portraits. Significantly, one figure from an early work, a waiter standing among the tables of a restaurant, is later repeated on a larger scale, but without gaining much in human ­individuality.

Morning in the Outlying Districts (2003), by Rick Amor.

They are usually alone so that the question of social or personal relationships cannot even arise; in another early work, several figures stand in a museum but none acknowledges the presence of any other. In a later painting, a wispy and insubstantial figure chases another up a set of stairs, but otherwise Amor’s work is composed of almost solipsistic individuals.

This is not to say that his figures are contented in their isolated state; on the contrary, there are frequent suggestions of loneliness and futile yearning. In the earliest picture in the show, before Amor had fully developed his powerful vision of the dystopian city, he paints what appears to be nothing but an empty shop window: and then we discern a faint reflection in the glass of the artist’s own form as he stands and sketches the scene. It is a metaphor for the slight and tenuous self-knowledge that we can derive from the modern urban environment.

More often, figures are witnessing things they cannot understand at all, like the dreamlike image of an elephant, or the ancient artefacts in museums, which visitors seem to encounter with a mixture of awe and incomprehension. In The empty days (1998), a visitor stands in a lit doorway looking into a dark ­museum storeroom. On the far left, in the ­shadows, is a colossal stone statue of a winged griffin gazing down, thousands of years old, a vestige of a past with which we have lost all sense of connection.

Awe-inspiring but alien remains like this evoke a sense of historical rootlessness: we don’t know who we are because we don’t understand who we were or where we have come from; instead we lead isolated and fragmented existences, aware only of a sickening depth of past time beneath our feet. A museum with the massive skull and tusks of a long-­extinct mastodon evokes a similar kind of existential nausea.

The isolated individual, in Amor’s painting, is sometimes a passer-by or a casual observer, but can take a more active role. The artist takes himself as model again for the strange image of a man peering into the open window of a house, shielding his eyes from the outside light — and thus shadowing his own face in the process — so that he can see into the comparatively gloomy interior. In another picture, The Halls (2007), an enigmatic ancient relief dominates the right side of the composition while the centre is occupied by one of those disconcerting voids so common in Amor’s interiors, and above we make out the shadowy figure of a man looking down into the room through a window: the image is poised between pathos and menace.

The interior and exterior spaces are thematically connected in Morning in the outlying districts (2003), in which the right side of the composition is dominated by the massive statue of a horse, visible behind a streetfront window. This motif, resonating with the oversized modernist interpretation of neoclassical forms in the architectural environment, reminds us that the very structure of the city is felt as something alien, whose origins are obscure and whose forms are at once confusing and overbearing.

This sense of the modern city is unmistakable and indeed inescapable in Amor’s compositions, but if we think back for a moment to the Piero della Francesca image of an ideal city, we may see more clearly why they produce this ­impression on us. For the Renaissance painting represents two important things: it ­offers the viewer a broad and welcoming space, and it ­implies that we are in the centre of the city, the point at which everything becomes most clearly intelligible.

Amor’s paintings, on the contrary, seldom evoke space and never serenity. Typically they are roads and paths, spaces between buildings, alleys and lanes, but we never see where they are going or when they come to an end. They are framed by massive architectural elements of which we see only a part, so that we cannot even understand the whole structure or meaning of the building.

Nor are his roads open perspectives; they are cut off by turns in the street or other obstacles. They are often enclosed, passing under arches and vaults, adding both to the sense of oversized and foreign structures, and to the claustrophobic feeling of imprisonment. Often too the structures are partially ruined, or under construction or renovation, as in Excavation (2011) with its single figure in a steel welder’s helmet, compounding the discomfort and inhospitality of the environment.

Excavation (2011), by Rick Amor.

As we examine Amor’s massive structures and look at the tiny human figures scurrying under arches or along the walls of huge buildings, we can’t help reflecting that Melbourne has provided, in a general way, models for many of these structures, although they have been amplified for expressive purposes. But above all, the city has been transformed into something like the artist’s own version of Piranesi’s ­labyrinthine imaginary prisons.

Piranesi published the Carceri d’invenzione in 1750, and later reworked them into more elaborate, detailed and compositionally dense versions published in 1761. Appearing in the middle of the 18th century, at the height of the Enlightenment and contemporary with the great compilation of both theoretical and practical knowledge in Diderot’s Encylopedie (1751-72), Piranesi hinted at a dark underside of the ­rational mind that would later be explored by Goya and other romantics.

Amor too, in the age of Wikipedia and the explosion of information, if not actual knowledge, made possible by the internet, reminds us of the darker side of our cities and of the culture that they embody. Not only are they not the ­humane and rational settings for human happiness and fulfilment, they may actually be ­experienced as dark and threatening prisons.

As in Piranesi, it is especially the networks of roads and lanes without end or purpose and vast structures that dwarf us that evoke these feelings. But Amor is also expert at creating further disconcerting effects through the use of light and shade, and especially the suggestion of voids, of dark fathomless spaces and of inexplicable openings and tangential spaces that may or may not lead somewhere.

These effects recall the experience of dreams, where long corridors lead nowhere or roads go around in mazes that seem inextricable and unending. Here, too, the dark voids — entrances to unseen spaces or dark underworlds — are used to evoke the dull anxiety of dreams, but less obvious and secondary or lateral doorways, openings and passages remind us of the equally disconcerting possibility of alternative paths, perhaps of alternative realities.

There are multiple openings and entries like this in Afternoon in the city (2003), which seems to depict something like a city carpark, and there are secondary doorways in Night in the city (2011), with its claustrophobic lane ­defaced with graffiti, and above a single illuminated window with a jacket on a coathanger. This feels like a discreet homage to Amor’s teacher John Brack but it also poignantly evokes an ­unseen inside life that underscores the cold and inhumane outsideness of the world of the lane.

Not all insides are more humane than the ­exterior world of the city, however. In Waiting (2016), a new acquisition by Hamilton gallery, which is very well supported and endowed by its local community, figures seen through the window are not socially connected but suspended in a state of expectation with no clear object.

Is there an end or a conclusion in this world? Ithaca (2011) alludes to the island of Odysseus, the place of his long-delayed nostos or homecoming — the word from which we derive nostalgia, originally the longing for home. We may even discern, in the ruined structure on the right, an allusion to the famous bed of Odysseus, which was carved from the stump of a tree, but now its story seems to have been forgotten. For Amor’s city is a place of passages and of passings, but not of destinations or arrivals, much less of home.

Rick Amor: Painting Silence

Hamilton Art Gallery, until March 4.