Ian Chandler
Greenaway Art Gallery

NEITHER IAN CHANDLER nor his art school contemporaries in the early 1960s could have foreseen the way his art would unfold over the subsequent 40 years of studio work. For a brief time, it looked as though Chandler (along with other hard-edge, colour-shape artists working in Adelaide in the late-1960s) would always be gliding down the face of a glassy style-wave which never looked like breaking.

But about the early 1970s, everything bottomed out. In a politicised art world in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, painting as a privileged art form lost traction. This was particularly evident within small art communities such as Adelaide, where studio painters became marginalised by the relocation of alternative forms of art practice, such as performance, photography and video, into the hot zone of social relevance.

Chandler however, against the run of play, just kept stretching another canvas and applying the paint. But the resonances of this volatile period saw changes emerge within his art; first the introduction of more natural elements, sourced from the Australian (Adelaide Hills) bush.

When historians write about SA painting in, say, 30 years' time, I imagine it will be Chandler's canvases of the 1990s, and into the new millennium, which will be singled out. Here lies the heartland of Chandlers' art, a passionate commitment to both social concerns and to painting. In this sense his art has always been at once surface and symbol.

This most recent body of works sustained these high energy levels but the thematic location, in Turkey, somehow anchored this body of work in deeper, silent waters. There was an elegiac note of introspection and repose in images dominated by trademark Chandler logos, in this instance calligraphic monograms and, in one work, a prayer rug.

One senses that at one level, Chandler's art which began as a journey into minimalist meta space has begun to turn slowly back to this source, symbolised perhaps by the Long Slow Simmer, as a work title suggests of a traditional Tajine, issuing billowing clouds of rhythmical lines across a richly decorated field.

The introduction also of what appears to be an ancient, carved figurine as repeat motif had the effect of connecting, or perhaps re-connecting Chandler's iconography with an almost forgotten genre of post-war British art (as exemplified by Henry Moore and others) which, in a previous era of global uncertainty and existential angst, called upon mysteries of ritual and form to somehow speak for a common humanity and future.