Jan Senbergs at NGV: urban metaphors

The core of Jan Senbergs’s vision is about the restlessness and crowding of the human mind.

Jan Senbergs’s Altered Parliament House 1 (1976).

At the very end of the comprehensive Jan Senbergs exhibition at the NGV is inscribed Edward Hopper’s observation: “If you could say it in words — there would be no reason to paint.” Many artists and writers have said or implied the same thing, for art exists precisely to give voice to intuitions and thoughts about human experience that cannot be adequately expressed in the clear but necessarily two-dimensional language of rational analysis.

But while Hopper’s principle could be applied to artists of entirely different temperaments, there seems to be something particularly apt to its use in this case, for Senbergs is not only a highly intuitive artist but also one who seems throughout his work to be particularly in the grip of his own sensibility: it seems to allow him little space to stand back or time to pause from a dynamic and relentlessly driven process.

This process is illustrated in a short video shown in the same room. The artist is seen beginning a large charcoal drawing. He appears to be using a smaller drawing in a sketchbook as a guide, but otherwise the work is executed directly and in a medium that is effectively un­erasable, so that there is no going back, no possibility of correcting a mark once made.

He begins with some structures in the upper left hand corner, then draws a couple of bold curved lines, which are to be streets. And then it is a matter of developing the street pattern and filling in the buildings between them: the image is of streets running through an anonymous collection of urban buildings. Once he starts there is no stopping: as Senbergs himself says, the difficulty is always in beginning, but after that you have to keep on, to see it through.

The exhibition opens with some relatively recent paintings of the same sort of subject, but on a much larger scale, panoramic, aerial views of cities. These are not ideal townscapes of harmonious squares and broad, serene avenues; they are congested agglomerations of edifices that have sprawled out of control like some malignant growth, and they are linked together by tangles of highways and flyovers that imply restless and frenetic motion going nowhere except around and around within the closed circuit of the urban prison.

It is a grim, claustrophobic and, in a term frequently used of Senbergs’s work, dystopian vision of human existence. But where did it come from and how did it evolve? This is the question that the exhibition attempts to answer as the second room takes us back to the beginning of his career in the 1960s in Melbourne, where he had grew up after migrating from Latvia at 10.

The earliest work has immediately the flavour of the distinctively Melburnian variety of metaphysical abstraction created by Roger Kemp and Leonard French, and it is not surprising to learn that French was among Senbergs’s teachers at Richmond Tech. Later, when he studied printmaking, specialising in screen-prints, he became friends with Kemp and other contemporary Melbourne artists as well.

These early works, then, combine human and mechanical forms in dark, moody compositions that become more mature and independent by the mid-60s, with the large and impressive The Night Parade (1966), a dark and nightmarish city painted over three panels. It was in 1966 that Senbergs won the Helena ­Rubinstein travelling art scholarship that took him to Europe for a year.

There he encountered the art of Eduardo Paolozzi, the Scottish artist who used pop and industrial imagery in screen-prints, in incongruous conjunctions that recalled the spirit of dada and surrealist collage. Inspired by Paolozzi’s example, Senbergs combined screen-printing and painting during the 70s in a highly original manner. The screen-print medium in effect allowed him to import found imagery directly into his paintings, and he became, in his own words, a scavenger of images, particularly ones that evoked the collapse of the industrial environment into disorder and entropy.

One such image from this period is based on the old Parliament House in Canberra. In the aftermath of the political events of 1975, Senbergs imagines the building surrounded by shanties and collapsing tenements, although perhaps most memorable are the curtains billowing out of the building’s windows. It is a good example of the inseparability of medium and process from the meaning of a work of art, for the screen-print-collage technique is what makes possible a certain way of thinking about forms and assembling material in a manner that defies conventional logic, utilitarian function and even gravity.

From the late 70s there is a fine series of drawings of industrial and urban sites, as though the artist felt the collage process could become repetitive and formalistic and that he had to reach out to the visible world to renew his art. By the early 80s Senbergs has left behind the hybrid printed-painted images and the flat poster-like finish this process entails. Instead, he adopts a more expressionistic and painterly manner with thicker impasto, in step with many other painters of the same period.

Among the best works of this period is ­Entrance to Port Liardet (1981), combining imposing forms and a certain clarity and decisiveness in the construction of space, as in the lower right hand part of the composition, allowing the viewer to enter into the picture and its world in a way that is not always possible when gestural animation takes the place of construction.

Also impressive is a series of large pictures of the blighted mining landscape around Queenstown in western Tasmania. One of the strongest of these, Sticht’s View to the Smelters 1 (1982) refers to an American metallurgist who became the manager of these mines in 1897 and introduced a new process for smelting that released huge amounts of sulphuric gas, destroying the natural environment all around.

Copperopolis — Mount Lyell (1983) is another of these pictures that can be seen as early documentations of environmental destruction at a time when conservation was moving from a fringe to a mainstream concern: 1983 was, as it happens, the very year the new Hawke government banned the building of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania.

The Antarctica pictures that follow are bigger and in some ways more ambitious, but somewhat uneven in their success. The large views of Antarctic scenery are broadly striking, but less satisfying on closer inspection because too much is left insufficiently articulated. Gestural verve is not enough in these cases, for it is less the subjective excitement of the artist that interests us than the evocation of a reality beyond subjective experience.

We can see this principle most clearly in an earlier period of Australian art, when Eugene von Guerard, the greatest Australian painter of the sublime, is not only scrupulously accurate in his rendition of mountainous scenery but humble and self-effacing in his approach to the grandeur of nature. And Immanuel Kant, the founder of modern philosophy, was similarly interested in the concept of the sublime precisely because it offered us an intimation of the noumenal world beyond the subjective realm of the phenomenal.

On the other hand, Senbergs’s view of the prow of a ship approaching a coast is powerful and memorable, because the details are sufficiently resolved and in this case the subjective viewpoint is perfectly appropriate to the theme: the picture is not about the immensity and power of nature, but about our sense of anticipation in approaching it.

Once again there is a change of subject, scale and medium with the series of enormous drawings of the artist’s own studio, one over two panels and another, even more ambitious, over four. They are remarkable works, and yet the most striking thing about them is the horror vacui that compels Senbergs to fill every inch of the pictorial surface with line: in the process, all sense of open space is abolished; like the crowded cityscapes, these are interiors with no room to breathe.

It is hard not to see these representations of the artist’s studio — his place of work — as a kind of externalised self-portrait, the image of a work process that knows no respite and has no sense of quiet or stillness, but proceeds by restless and compulsive activity until there is no room to add another mark. The same sensibility is evident in the most impressive of the recent landscapes — a new departure for an artist who has for the most part confined himself to architectural and industrial motifs, except for the unconventional landscape subjects of a bleak and poisoned mining site and the equally inorganic starkness of the Antarctic environment.

This landscape, in contrast, is of relatively conventional subject, a rocky cliff above a pool of water, with a large eucalyptus on the left. The tree trunk is extremely, and a little incongruously, smooth, while the rest of the picture, except for the glimpses of sky, is filled with heavy impasto.

What is particularly notable is that Senbergs has made no real attempt to distinguish the texture of the reflection in the water from that of the rocks above it. A painter who chose to deal with a subject like this would usually be led to ponder the subtle difference between the thing itself and its ephemeral image in the water — whether one thinks of Tom Roberts or of Monet — but here it is as though both are equally solid and tangible.

This peculiarity brings us back to the core of Senbergs’s vision, which is ultimately about the restlessness and crowding of the human mind. Nature can offer no relief from a condition that is rooted in the human spirit.

The most effective metaphor for this human condition, however, remains the city, a structure produced by and expressing the condition of the mind. And it’s interesting that although Senbergs takes several different cities as his subjects throughout the exhibition, by far the most effective images are those of Melbourne.

A pair in the final room makes this very clear. The one of Sydney is comparatively bland, a kind of postcard panorama of the most famous sights, but without any real sense of purpose. The view of Melbourne, though, is ­intensely gripping. Here one feels that the ­artist knows the whole structure intimately and from the inside. The way the river curves and turns towards its opening on to Port Phillip Bay seems to reveal its inner sense of direction, and the railyards that line it along one side are like the central bundle of nerves that spread out to inform and animate every part of the human body.

Jan Senbergs:Observation — Imagination

National Gallery of Victoria. Until June 12.