ianchandler.org

Of all artists active in Adelaide over the last thirty plus years, Ian Chandler stands out as someone who has regularly used an artist statement in association with exhibitions of his work as a vehicle for communicating social concerns. His practice of producing extensive explanatory notes has defied an art world trend from the later 1970s of engaging a writer to produce a critical essay which contextualised the work within wider ideological or theoretical zones. Such essays have often been ambient to the artwork exhibited and on occasions became an opportunity for the writer to demonstrate a grasp of genre, recent travel, extensive reading and a grasp of complex ideas. Characteristically Chandler has always chosen a direct path and the communication has invariably been brief and blunt. Here is an example:

Day follows night, Life goes on after the catastrophe of the State Bank collapse. The people's struggle to maintain jobs and living standards while paying off the debt becomes extremely difficult. A lack of political vision is a further burden. The rain sets in.

Ian Chandler, notes by the artist for CONTINUUM DARK, 1996, from his Greenaway Art Gallery 1996 exhibition.

Notes for other works in this (1996) exhibition typically covered a broad sweep of social and political issues from gambling, corporate greed and corruption of community morals. The sentiments and statements looked as if taken from activist Adelaide art of the mid 1970's when anti-Americanism was at its height and artist-worker alliances were committing to an art of struggle against right wing forces. But for all that (and if explanatory statements are set aside) Chandler's imagery in this exhibition, and others of the late 1990's and the early part of this decade, almost deflects any socially-critical reading. They are first and foremost, paintings, not political banners. Into each image, as Chandler has done from the outset of his public work, have been incorporated a series of visual elements which conspire to offer the viewer a choice of readings and experiences. He has explained this in the following way.

I am researching, through the convention of studio easel painting, the development of a two dimensional space which is relevant and contemporary. The works are multi-layered accumulations of linear-diagrammatic imagery which allow investigation, comparison and connection amongst the density of visual information .

Ian Chandler, Notes on Paintings, Greenaway Art Gallery exhibition, 29 August - 19 September 2001

Ian Chandler's art carries the imprint of formative years which have determined that his paintings have always retained a strong sense of social engagement without neglecting the task of formulating an authentic, personal visual language of expression. Young contemporary artists, including Chandler, working or studying in Adelaide across the late 1960's - 1970's period were politicised by global events and also by the intensity of local and national debates about the role of art and artists in society. For artists like Bob Boynes, Ann Newmarch and Mandy Martin who chose the pathway of political struggle there were the sureties of social and cultural relevance. Others working as performance or post-object artists could rationalise their practice as counter-culture gestures. For painters like Chandler, Barrie Goddard, Chris Coventry and others, the way forward required different strategies. There may be no evident trace of political consciousness or intent in Chandler's colour-field, hard-edge inspired images of the early 1960's. Imagery was characterised by a fusion of hard-edge geometrics mediated by passages of spray-gun tonalities. Chandler (and also Goddard) drew some ideas from photographic illustrations and articles in the journal Scientific American. The first moon landing, the reality of satellites tracking and re-mapping the earth and the excitement of the space race era provided the context for bodies of work in which space became a metaphor for altered states of consciousness. Chandler recalls looking in amazement at the now famous photographic image of the earth rising over a lunar landscape. It was as if, he said, 'a new reality was being born'. Suddenly the zone between scientific time-space theories and diagrams on the one hand and imaginative speculation and imagery on the other had narrowed.

In two exhibitions (1968 and 1970) Chandler developed a distinctive iconography, almost Leger-goes-to-outer-space in its conjunctions of gleaming cylinders, rods, pipes and rectangular solids resembling the rear end of an intergalactic cruiser about to go to warp 10. For the artist at the time it wasn't really an 'SF comes true' affirmation but a way of coming to terms with an emerging era of technological acceleration and control. In his 1973 exhibition Earth Development Corp , the central nature of Chandler's thoughts on a new, technology-mediated world were revealed in images which depicted a symbolic earth (a globe or notional landscape) at the mercy of mechanized, de-humanizing forces. By the late 1970's bold geometrics and bright chromatics had made way for a softer figurative style inspired by treescapes around the artist's home in the Adelaide Hills and along the River Murray near Mildura. There were practical reasons for the transition. The adoption of a looser, more painterly style meant that compositions could be changed at will without being locked into tight hard- edge production protocols. Compositions based on close focus observations of tree trunks, plants and rock formations allowed the artist to acknowledge a relationship with nature as the primary idea underlying his work, while retaining a freedom to exploit and explore formal elements of shape, colour and texture. In close ups of plants and seedpods produced in the mid 1980's, a balance was struck between primary form and the interwoven complexity of patterning. While nature in the form of these trees, plants and rocks disappears from Chandler's work in the mid to later 1990's, its models of complex interactions of energy had been absorbed as metaphors for social, economic and political forces at work. By 1995 the artist had adopted a style of expression and a methodology, which has largely served his art to the present. The imagery is effectively a combination of overlaid colour-line drawings. Overhead projector transparencies allow the artist to position each diagram onto the canvas to fully exploit the visual complexities created by up to ten overlays of linear designs. The relationship between style and content is tight. The seething lines criss -cross each other like Internet circuitry which can be 'drilled down' into or taken at face value. The painting, Chandlers declares, 'sits there', perhaps to be contemplated or to overpower the viewer with too much choice and too much data. In this sense Chandler's imagery has always been, at once, surface and symbol.

As the content of more recent work has become more global, more prophetic and more ambiguous in terms of outcomes of ancient wisdom colliding with contemporary materialism, the complexity of the imagery may in itself come to read as a sign of the disempowerment of individuals, unable to see sense or pattern in the chain of global events.

Ian Chandler's art, transitioning from deep space-fuelled realms of interacting forces, through a radical return to local nature; the maze-like stands of Adelaide Hills gums and the bristling intensity of plant forms up-close and then the mesmeric parables for our time, declares a commitment to painting and expresses an imperative to ground art practice in something deeply felt, be it a sense of social contract or human worth, or the wonder of human and individual existence and the freedom to conjure images from empty space.

Boston, September 2004
John Neylon is an Adelaide-based art writer and curator. He writes regularly for The Adelaide Review.