Chandler shows way
By Adam Dutkiewicz

The Advertiser, Tuesday 16th November 2004

Ian Chandler, Simone Kennedy
Greenaway Art Gallery
Until Friday

PAINTING is a medium moving ahead, having now negotiated the hurdles of the 1980s that claimed it was dead. But over the past 40 years, one practitioner has stood up for painting in South Australia and steadily worked towards his mature method, which has become a dazzlingly complex, layered matrix of metaphors and associations.

That man is Ian Chandler, now seriously ill, and his large-format oils of the past decade or so have stated boldly that painting can compare with its alleged usurper, the moving image. He has become one of Adelaide's most impressive contemporary artists, for he always aims for more and is dissatisfied with easily attained solutions and easily digested aesthetics.

Chandler was once a hard-edge painter, when it was all the rage around 1970, but he methodically worked through other means to arrive at his mature method. The latest series is brimful with cross-cultural connections and allusions, sparked by his politically engaged consciousness in the aftermath of 9/11.
Hence we find paintings that investigate the connections between Australia and the Middle East; through our historical relationship with Turkey and the scars of Gallipoli, with a combination of representational drawing, totemic shapes that could be carved figurines or denatured medals, Warholesque portraiture and Arabic calligraphy. These paintings are a two-dimensional equivalent of Peter Greenaway's films, and the gallery is transformed into an Aladdin's cave of visual messages and, like the lamp in Tajine - The long, slow simmer, each picture releases its genie.

Simone Kennedy has been attracted to the grotesque back streets of modernist art for years, not only the sexual surrealism of Hans Bellmer, among others, but also the codes embedded in the use of colour by artists such as Balthus. Her take on this territory in this series, The Young Girls, is infused with a pop distortion (a Brechtian distancing?) or gaudification, if you like, along the lines of Jeff Koons's hyper-sweet neo-pop: comic-book colours that reflect the cultural impact of animation in contemporary cinema on modern life.
When I look at a painting like Maud, a truly bizarre caricature, I see deeper connections with the cartoon characters of our childhoods, early Looney Tunes or even the Continental favorite Toppo Gigio, as much as the aforementioned fine art lineages. Kennedy's absurdist creations have a touch of grand guigol theatre, the comedy-horror we would widely identify in Monty Python. But her new-wave surrealism is a female version of this previously masculine territory that deals with self-image, identity, and insecurities in relationships with others and the world.

Hence the loosened anatomical parts, the phallic symbols, the burning bush, the uncaged desire of Tinkerbell. And the recurring motif of hooded lovebirds in The Street and The Yellow Chair, and the darker moments, such as Soft Tissue Memory, with its nasty raptor lurking in folds of pink flesh, a symbol of vulnerability and incipient mortality.