Ian Chandler, Leo Neuhofer
SPRING UMBRELLA
Ron Rowe
Maeve Woods, Nola Jones
Greenaway Art Gallery

Paul Greenaway's routine of running two, sometimes three artists concurrently occasionally implodes bur can also strike notes of resonance. Chandler and Neuhofer, both Adelaide-based artists, appeared in this exhibition to have little in common. Chandler, as his notes make clear, had bones to pick with the greedy eighties. Neuhofer had clambered, it seemed, into a bathysphere and gone trawling for images in ocean deeps. But both artists seemed intent on snaring their viewers with powerful webs and rhythms of line or highlights and shadows, holding the gaze long enough to beam some messages into the part of the brain which deals with dread(ful) things.

For Chandler it was a litany of sorrows - the State Bank fiasco, gambling, nuclear testing in the Pacific, youth unemployment, a sort of who's who of social evils (with the environment as the notable absentee). Back in the '70s, an artist like Bob Boynes would have picked up the airbrush and constructed some photorealist images of humans at risk. But Chandler has always been an arms length artist, pinning heart on sleeve but committed at the end of the day to exploring aesthetic options. Thus in The Legacy, a literal illustration of the State Bank building was barely discernable in a complex blend of overlaid patterns, outsized numbers and diagrams of hands signing words such as 'Marcus Clark Chairman'. The resultant effect in most works was similar to gazing intently on the watermark patterns of a giant banknote.

These quite beautifully crafted, strangely joyous configurations held all the cheer of cheap Christmas wrapping paper and the temptation to sprinkle glitter over the lot must have been enormous. A valiant, almost heroic act of the will, to force us as well as the artist to gaze on the evils of our time, if only for a few extra seconds, wasted I feel, on worthless events and bleak domestic truths. The most enduring images (apart from The Gamblers ) were the yin and yang duo, Continuum Light and Continuum Dark, two delicately understated images of rain, symbolizing the Deluge which well drowns us mortals in State Bank debt. Stuff the moralizing, I really wanted to enjoy the images for their own sake, if only to take my mind off the question which haunts us all, "If Tim has only a cab fare left in his pockets where did all the money actually go?"

In regard to Leo Neuhofer's 1993 exhibition at the Festival Theatre I recall describing his paintings along the lines of deepdown sea beds caught in the flash of probing camera. The overall association with primal, lifeless sea beds hasn't changed but the artist had begun (in this recent exhibition) to refine the ribs and striations to the pint where they invested these apparent landscapes with zoomorphic qualities, turning ranges and valleys into serpentine coils. This potter turned painter has never completely abandoned the tactile and the eye in United Water and Sea Change slipped and slithered over these swellings forms like hands cupping and coiling wheel thrown clay. Apocalyptic drowned landscapes as cheerless as Ian Chandler's outsized bank notes.