ianchandler.org

Yvonne Boag, Ian Chandler
Greenway Gallery
Until Wednesday

MANY in the arts world would find it difficult to conceive of a greater contrast than the works of contemporary painters Yvonne Boag and Ian Chandler.
The former operates in the abstract, reducing her subject matter to bold, virtually geometrical forms and blocked-in figures. The latter aspires to great complexity in his multi-layered surfaces, like simulations of chaos theory in infinite regression.

Boag's works are selected from a much larger series and what survives in this exhibition may not necessarily be the best of her recent output. One senses she is less consistent than Chandler, as she hones her skills and becomes comfortable with her forays into the abstract.
However, in the Ginza lights series, she remains entirely fluent with her printmaking.
Boag's largest canvases work best in this series, which began while working in a remote Aboriginal community.

In these she builds her compositions as journeys in a visual landscape, similar to the Aboriginal representational style used in churingas and dot paintings, using blocks of mostly earthy and vegetative colours over a basically white background. In works such as Urban landscape with dog, the bright colours and easy style in a marriage of Russel Drysdale and suprematism have great visual appeal. I was less convinced by the Urban map paintings, which avoid the semi-figurative elements of the epic works, relying on more subtle forms of visual reference to the real, such as scratched out vertical and horizontal stripes to suggest such elements as grass and water. Because of the white background and lack of framing or edging, the blocks of colour tend to float as sculptural shapes on the wall, so the narrative intention tends to be derailed by an aesthetic collision.

Chandler's work is also large, and detailed, resembling a postmodern version of Sydney pioneering abstractionist Ralph Balson's non-objective paintings of the mid-1950s.
However, instead of being satisfied with a purely visual field of daubed colour, Chandler is driven to inject meaning on several levels, including the use of hand-signing to convey his often political content. For example, in The body stripped bare, alluding to Marcel Duchamp's masterpiece The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, he incorporates text to target the sinister side of multinational business and the stock market.