Art of Colin Lanceley alive with hedonism

There is something quintessentially Sydney about Colin Lanceley’s art, in its celebration of pleasure, its aspiration to happiness, and also in its restless activity and animation.

Colin Lanceley working on The light fantastic [after Carlo Crivelli] 2003

Openings are not the best occasions for looking at exhibitions. As a friend of mine remarked with caustically camp wit many years ago, “Look at those people staring at the pictures; they obviously don’t know anyone here.” He had put his finger on the reason that art openings are so popular. They allow people to do what they really want to do, which is drink and gossip, while convincing themselves that they are effortlessly absorbing culture by osmosis.

I hardly ever attend openings, and it was a pleasure to meet a number of old friends at the Colin Lanceley evening. The last time I had been to such an event at the National Art School, where I lectured for many years, was in March 2017, for the launch of Deborah Beck’s book on Rayner Hoff. The guest of honour was Barry Humphries, who was as usual brilliant, perceptive, provocative and surprising.

A lot has changed in the past five years, and the Lanceley exhibition opening was anything but surprising. Now, of course, all such occasions have to be preceded by multiple repetitions of the ritual known as the acknowledgement of country. The sentiments in these statements would be laudable if they were not so formulaic, if their appearance were not so predictable and if their delivery were not so wooden.

It is not good to say things that are false or that we don’t mean; the first is called lying and the second hypocrisy.

If a speaker spontaneously mentioned a relevant connection with the occasion, it could be moving and thought-provoking. But when officials mouth compulsory formulas they have learnt by rote and repeat without hearts or minds being engaged, and without any relation to behaviour before or after the utterance, they do more harm than good.

There was a welcome to country address from an Indigenous elder. This would be unremarkable today except for the fact that I happened to have heard the same speech, word for word, on another occasion a couple of weeks earlier. I was shocked, but an old friend who has a tougher stomach for openings assured me that he had already heard this routine many times before.

Song of a summer night (Lynne's garden) 1985, by Colin Lanceley. National Art Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales National Art Archive. Gift of Kay Lanceley 2016

Still disturbed that someone could make a speech – even scattered with jokes surely too feeble to have been scripted – over and over again without modification, I had a look online and found that there is a YouTube clip of him giving the same performance. Like the acknowledgement of country, such officially mandated ceremonies – for which institutions naturally have to pay – become automatic and vacuous.

It could have been different: a speech by an Aboriginal elder would be interesting if it included relevant information about the Indigenous people who once lived in the vicinity of the old Darlinghurst Gaol, the location today of the National Art School. Perhaps the site was used for ceremonial purposes; perhaps there was a camp nearby, or stories of interaction between these peoples and early settlers. Instead, we were presented with a generic performance that took no account of the specifics of local Indigenous experience, much less of the history of the prison or the National Art School, and which had no relevance at all to the exhibition being opened that night.

And, indeed, Lanceley’s work could not be further from the stifling miasma of political conformism and ideological compliance that has enveloped the cultural world today, and which has exacerbated its increasing separation from reality outside the bubble, dominated by ruthless economic imperatives.

Colin Lanceley Atlas 1965. Estate of Colin Lanceley/Copyright Agency. Photo: AGNSW

Above all, Lanceley’s work is hedonistic, visibly inspired by the decorative spirit of Matisse, whose work was surveyed at the Art Gallery of NSW earlier this year. In reviewing that exhibition, I argued that Matisse’s inspiration can best be understood as Epicurean, not just in the sense that his art is devoted to pleasure but also, and more subtly, that it withdraws from the will, energy and ambition that are so characteristic of Picasso’s art.

This hedonism was not immediately apparent in Lanceley’s earliest work, partly made in collaboration with two other young artists he had met at the National Art School, Mike Brown and Ross Crothall, who called themselves the Annandale Imitation Realists. The movement lasted from 1961 to 1964, when Lanceley left for Europe.

Brown went on to be a controversial avant-gardist who simultaneously excoriated Sydney’s modern art establishment; his notorious work The Kite was shown in 1964. He was the subject of an important study by Richard Haese: Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian avant-garde, 1953-97 (2011). Ross Crothall seems to have returned to his native New Zealand and disappeared around 1968.

These early works are well represented in the first part of the exhibition. They have been associated with various movements, including Dada and Pop, but the main thing is that they clearly belong to that alternative current in modernist art that the late Bernard Smith identified as opposed to the Formalesque, as he wanted to rename the mainstream of modernism.

This alternative current, associated with “anti-art” gestures and the re-use of non-artistic forms and images, often expresses itself in variations on collage, which is also the basis of the Annandale Imitation Realist style. Found objects, rubbish and detritus are assembled into patterns that often look like tribal fetishes and sometimes recall the Mannerist painter Arcimboldo, in whose paradoxical composite images objects as different as fruit, animals or books can turn into limbs or features of the face.

But Lanceley was not ultimately drawn to the aesthetic of detritus, and we can already see in a transitional work such as Atlas (1965) a move towards elegance and wit, with recycled mechanical elements – recalling the art of Robert Klippel – assuming playful narrative forms. The whole work is poised between figure and furniture; between drawing-room propriety, obscenity and humour.

The works of his maturity, though very different in sensibility, retain some of the structural principles of his earliest pieces. It is collage, assemblage and construction that give Lanceley’s oeuvre its distinctive formal qualities, quite unlike any of his contemporaries.

Ostensibly, most of these pictures – for want of a better word – are landscapes, but they are not painted in a conventional or even unconventional way. That is to say they are not painted as a continuous surface, but rather composed of painted elements complemented by assembled and constructed ones.

Jazz, by Colin Lanceley, archive 1980s-1990s. National Art Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales National Art Archive. Gift of Kay Lanceley 2016

The painted parts of these works, strictly speaking, are sometimes just disconnected details, like trees or shrubs or patches of grass, mimicking the scraps of imagery that are stuck on in a collage. At other times they are, as it were, background elements, like the sea or the sky; or they can be some combination of these, forming an engaging composite of elements that represent distinct impressions, rather than an overall conception.

This is part of the lightness of effect of Lanceley’s pictures. But their most distinctive features are the foreground elements that are three-dimensional, either found or carved out of wood, painted and attached to the pictorial surface. The overall effect of the work is thus a combination of decorative painterly patterns, recalling Matisse, with attached three-dimensional elements whose lineage goes back to synthetic cubism.

In Midwinter spring (1986) – which records a very different midwinter from the one we are enduring this year – we are presented with decorative and ludic variations on the view from a friend’s garden, presumably overlooking Sydney Harbour. Behind, the water and sky are painted in like a theatre backdrop; on the left a row of cypresses borders the view. In the foreground, a combination of painted and solid elements suggests an arcade; a single solid column from a balustrade is followed into perspective by three more and the balustrade itself in simplified form, recalling Matisse’s late paper cutouts. A table on the left, set with a few still life items, suggests the setting for a harbourside luncheon.

It has to be admitted that this composite formula is not ultimately compatible with the highest ambitions of landscape. Great landscape painting arises from the synthesis of two things: a profound understanding of the nature that is the subject of the picture, and an equally strong sense of pictorial composition, which is ultimately grounded in the geometric matrix of the frame, but is more immediately found in the study of the great artists of the landscape painting tradition. Considered from this point of view, it cannot be said that Lanceley’s paintings convey a deep understanding of or feeling for the life of nature; they don’t go much deeper than a spontaneous sense of pleasure in a delightful view on a lovely day. This is much better than not feeling pleasure on such an occasion, but it still falls short of the deeper engagement in nature and a true apprehension of a reality beyond our own sensations and pleasure.

Midwinter spring (James's garden) 1986, by Colin Lanceley. National Art Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales National Art Archive. Gift of Kay Lanceley 2016

Nor do his works offer any very deep interest at the level of pictorial composition, and this is an almost inevitable consequence of his collage and assemblage process. The painted parts of the pictures, as I mentioned, are not much more than backdrops with little formal interest in their own right; meanwhile the formal elements that dominate the pictures are largely in the foreground, and made of up of the attached constructions.

In this sense the pictures are animated rather than really composed, and above all incapable of achieving that synthesis of natural observation with almost abstract compositional structure that characterises great landscape painting.

This may seem a rather severe judgment, but it is not the whole story. It is important to see what these works are not, and they are not serious landscapes that take their place in a history of the genre. But that is not to say they do not have other merits of a different kind, which belong to their playful and hedonistic spirit.

In general, the work conveys a sense of pleasurable calm and serenity, once again inherited from the Epicurean spirit of Matisse.

But if peace reigns in the background, Lanceley’s foregrounds are filled with an animation that conveys the artist’s pleasure in his process. This is clearly the work of a man who delighted in making things, not one who sought to absorb himself in stillness and contemplation, but who loved the energy and bustle of the studio, who enjoyed improvising and inventing and trying things out.

There is, no doubt, something quintessentially Sydney about Lanceley’s art, in its celebration of pleasure, its aspiration to happiness, and also in its restless activity and animation. And Sydney audiences in particular will no doubt always enjoy his witty, elegant and refined celebration of earthly delights.

Colin Lanceley: Earthly delights, National Art School, Sydney, until August 13.