Adelaide artist Tom Phillips is a rarity. Painting figurative images of loneliness, separation and societal breakdown with sculpturally thick and glutinous paint, is in direct contrast to the inward-looking, angst-driven personal abstraction and aesthetic minimalism that surrounds him.  The question though is, is there room or place for figurative expressionism today? Or even, why are so few artists using the human figure as a vehicle to explore the human condition. Portraitists aiming to win the major portrait prizes with renditions of celebrity hardly qualify.

       Art historians recognise two main streams in the contemporary art of the 20^th century, one stemming from the emotional and the other, the aesthetic. Broad groupings bring together Matisse, the Fauves, the Expressionists, Pollock, Surrealists and a variety of performance artists using their own bodies as vehicles for expression. In the other camp there are all of those artists who take Duchamp as a starting point and work with idea and intellect from the Constructivists to Minimalism to installation. The boundaries are particularly porous.

          While both strands continue into the 21^st century, the idea of raw emotion on canvas seems to have lost its appeal. Perhaps we are already saturated with images of suffering and violence. Perhaps the illusion of suffering and violence on a two-dimensional surface simply cannot match the immediacy of the graphic imagery flooding social media and the evening news but then again, successful paintings, and any form of art dealing with emotion, manage to avoid the immediate. Golub ostensibly worked with sculpted, drawn, and tapestry-like images derived from photographs of the Vietnam War taking the drama of Expressionists such as Beckmann and Dix, but denying inward angst to explore themes of male aggression and political power.

      The work of the early German Expressionists was a response to WW1 while Keiffer sifted through the detritus and cultural baggage of WW2. Picasso’s outrage at the Spanish Civil War is well known as is the work of an earlier artist such as Goya but recent wars have taken a back seat to personal angst. Has the idea of figurative expressionism as a way of responding to war simply become a cliché? The sanitised media coverage we experience bears no resemblance to the reality. Recruiters in WW1 banned the publication of photos of the conditions or the dead In fear that no one would volunteer, but the once-removed and impermanent death associated with video games where the reload button denies reality, renders war and death as entertainment.

       Much art was produced during the recent pandemic and any number of artists recognised the detrimental societal effects of lockdowns and tried to express it in terms of colour and texture – highly personal abstraction. The death count in so many countries was the equal of any war body count but painting a pandemic is not the same as a Picasso responding to the destruction of part of his homeland or the New Objectivity artists dealing with an aftermath of unemployment, a destroyed economy and war cripples on every street corner. I cannot imagine any artist choosing to paint images of the declining mental health of current society or indeed the images or lives of the those living in the disability sector – all conditions that will historically characterise the world we now live in.

       Tom Phillps is not alone in coming from a background of unemployment and poverty in a distant suburb poorly served by public transport and infrastructure. Every capital city has just such outposts but to use that background to comment about humanity though art is something else. Urban and rural Aboriginal artists certainly have something to rail about with a history of abuse and cultural destruction behind them but there is an assumption that the living conditions that Tom describes no longer exist. That is far from the case.

       So, the question remains as to whether current society will even accept images such as the ones Tom Phillips paints. He regularly makes the short list of art competitions and receives glowing commendations from art writers, but few seem prepared to hang such a painting on their walls let alone declare it a winner when they are so many landscape painters out there producing nice images. Australian forbears such as the artists Peter Booth, John Blackman and Arthur Boyd all worked with broad themes of the state of humanity in an Australian context as they experienced it in the first half of last century. Much of what we expect from life now hardly existed then, and indeed they all hang proudly in museums courtesy of  heart-felt need to recognise the past when raw emotion wasn’t something to hide or transfigure as soap-opera pseudo drama. Current taste may well limit their appeal other than as investment items. When you can buy a nice landscape or innocuous abstract to hang on your wall why would you even consider something that reminded you that the real world is not the sanitised paradise of hope pedalled by governments and television drama. Do we believe that art is capable of not just carrying the weight of human misery but expressing it in a way that is acceptable? After all, death is now ‘passing’ and being a refugee equates to ‘criminal parasite’. We are going to reach a tipping point in Australia, just as has happened in the UK, of throwing caution to the winds as the much-vaunted 80% vaccination rate is reached and releasing people to enjoy themselves without restriction. In the meantime, the mental health crisis grows and the criminal activities of the have-nots occupy more evening news time than ever.

      Themes of loneliness and isolation as explored by Tom Phillips will outlast any contemporary malaise simply because they have always been there but will art in general venture down the same path? Current practice suggests not. As a society we have become, to say the least, squeamish, and to say the worst, desensitised to the point of accepting fantasy as reality. Tom may be the self-professed protegee of Golub, Bacon, Booth and Sidney Nolan but he may also be a generational one of a kind and be as little accepted as was Golub in his lifetime. Such is the fate of artists who do not become flavour of the month and even those who like the butterfly emerge, live and die within three weeks.