ianchandler.org

As a beginning art student at the tail end of the 60s I wandered into Bonython Gallery in Jerningham Street just to see what it was like. Bonython's was a converted house and before it was a gallery the people who lived in the house were my parents' friends and I visited there often as a kid. I'd come in out of a curious nostalgia but it was no big deal. But what was a big deal was the work displayed in the gallery by Ian Chandler, a young painting lecturer at the art school.

Even then I could sense the work was 'cutting edge' in its pristine combination of abstraction and illusion with flat areas of colour in juxtaposition with a sharp geo-metallic and biomorphic aesthetic that suggested the antithesis of the Australian tradition of depicting people and forms in the landscape.

What I didn't know then was that this landscape tradition would have constituted a thematic basis in Ian's artistic apprenticeship and that other influences had come between this artist and that tradition, influences that when taken to their logical conclusion threatened to relegate painters and painting to the margins of a new pluralist mainstream.

As an ambitious young painter, Ian Chandler stormed into local prominence in the early '60s, a pivotal time in relation to Australia's love/hate relationship with modernist art. While international influences filtered down to the Athens of the south, the echoes of the Antipodean's rejection of international abstraction were still resonant in the conscious decisions of many Australian painters not to adopt the quintessentially American stylistic monoliths of late modernism - abstract expressionism and its nemesis, pop.

However, all of this was about to change. The '60s had brought jet travel that in turn brought international art magazines to Oz, the lavishness of which informed the baby- boomers who were swelling the ranks of art students in a period of economic boom that was in turn creating an unprecedented desire for the very modern trappings of culture, in particular, modern art.

Ian Chandler and his peers were amongst the first generation of painters to look to the new art magazines, as opposed to the work of their predecessors, to inform their work. And what they saw was a post painterly abstraction that followed in the wake of and appeared to synthesize the dialectics of 'hot' expressionism and 'cool' pop.

The hard-edge variant of this style had ostensibly abandoned expressionist and gestural engagement by artists in favour of an apparition of 'pure colour', as a result of which avant-garde painting came to be seen as overtly decorative and of having ". an intellectual vacancy that required a constant verbal alibi. Not only did this work have the formalist text of directions for reading it, it had a prescription for making it" (1)

Over the period of his early career a number of reviewers had pointed out that even in his most formalist moments Ian Chandler's paintings referenced an elemental universe of meanings. Amongst that of his contemporaries Ian's work was distinctive in that it appeared to evince human and/or global concerns that never really capitulated to formalist concerns. "One guesses he loves, hates and fears all at once" . (2)

However, by the mid '70s, it had become uneasily clear to many observers that the exclusive and detached codes of 'pure painting' pointed to painting having failed to fulfil the socio-political agendas commensurate with '70s ideologies.

After being 'king' for a decade painting fell into a kind of disrepute and artists pioneered other modes of expression and inscription. Some painters stayed with the colour field thing in the form of lyrical abstraction and some painters, like Ian Chandler, whose technical competence had always been admired, went full circle back to where he attempted to try to see painting again as if for the first time. In this confusing and somewhat polarised scenario his chosen form of inscription remained clearly in focus - " I wanted to get back into paint that I can get around in." (3)

While Ian had a day job and could afford to subject his practice to such interrogation, it wasn't just his own practice that concerned him as his job was to teach painting and drawing at the art school and thus, as is his nature, he was doubly compelled to reassess all that he had learnt and all he had done.

In 1977, "Ian Chandler was last seen displaying huge painted and framed colour structures at the CAS Gallery.now, two years later, he is at Bonython Art Gallery and everything has changed. The great hard-edged slabs of colour that were seen then and referred back to geometrical constructions.have been replaced with, of all things, the gum tree and the bush.But it isn't a return to Hans Heysen nostalgia: just a reworking of the old tradition that in fact is also a further development of Chandlers' painterly concerns". (4)

And so began the rest of his life's work as an artist.

(1) Coventry, C. (1984) Catalogue essay, The Wrong Place: five Sydney painters.