I

Alex Beckinsale. Fragile Bodies. Floating Goose Studios.2020

I have lost count of how many times I have gone to an exhibition and been presented at the door with a book-length explanation of the work on the walls or the floor. Picasso said in an interview that if he could write it down there would be no need to do the painting…or words to that effect. In many ways I blame the way students are taught at secondary and art school level where lengthy explanation of every thought has to be documented. A secondary art teacher told me recently that for assessment purposes, the final work was irrelevant, but that is another matter.

Art is a visual and audio dialogue between the artist and the audience. Here I am taking art in its broadest sense. While art can be about climate change or personal demons, it still has to speak for itself in artistic terms.

Personally, I would rather have nothing to read on entering an exhibition and make up my own mind both what the work is about and the quality of it.

The exhibition by Alex Beckinsale at Floating Goose Studios in Adelaide is a pleasant surprise. I have seldom seen work from the darkest end of the tonal spectrum covering gallery walls. These paintings are not just black but a subtle rendering of dark greys that both disguise and delineate the forms of rocks and jetties. The lightest of the tonal range is reserved for the human figures. The silvery greys could be mistaken for moonlight adding solidity to the human form, but this is not a romanticised landscape and nor does it echo the idea of awe in the face of nature projected through say, a Turner and his swirling masses of colour. There is no divine force at work here so much as the protracted anxiety of the dispossessed. Something has been lost. The much- vaunted power of humankind to control the natural world perhaps?

The light on the bodies is non-directional even when the upper layers are lit and rather than just engendering the sense of fear mentioned by Jess Taylor in her catalogue essay, the light picks out the form as though carving it from the solid mass of tone in which it finds itself. Certainly, the idea of the fragility and vulnerability is present but the form has tensile strength and is one with its surroundings rather than something separate and alien. Whatever is enveloping the landscape, whether it is diminishing light or the menace of the jetty piles, the human form has been or is about to be absorbed and rather than an unsettling emotional state, there is a sense of inevitability.

The size of these paintings is important to the overall idea. The figures are almost life-sized creating an immediate relationship with the viewer and the dimensions and solidity of the jetty beams, menacing as they might be in silhouette, are also a comfort. Anyone who has sat beneath a jetty understands that there is safety not afforded by the open beach. The solidity and immovability of the piles is shelter. In some ways a view to a featureless ocean reaching out to an unknown horizon is more of a threat in that there is no human geometry by which to measure it but in the painting above, the horizon itself acts as a control mechanism.

That is not so say that these paintings don’t work because they obviously do and are painted with a high degree of skill but the accompanying essay presents only one possible interpretation and reads like a grab-bag of ideas in first edit mode. Surely, works should be allowed to speak for themselves rather than being filtered through a biased 800 word plus explanation. While I appreciate that the essay is written by an artist [probably a friend] about an artist, it assumes an identity by its beautifully printed nature of being at least as important as the work. Surely, this is an imbalance. Beckinsale’s work dos not need a competing document in order to justify itself.