Eugene CARCHESIO
Australia b.1960
More information about the artist
187 works for the People’s Republic of Spiritual Revolution 1975–90 investigates some of Carchesio’s ongoing themes and ideas. The work is influenced by early twentieth-century abstraction, and draws on a variety of Christian, pagan and Eastern symbolisms. The majority of these small paintings, collages and drawings are made on inexpensive graph paper (the kind used in school exercise books). They contain found materials, such as pressed flower petals, photographs, old stamps, poems and fragments of cloth. These materials make the work fragile, and over time it will become brittle and faded. This vulnerability is part of the work’s meaning.
The idea for Dead leaves of Tokyo 1999 came out of Carchesio’s three-month residency in Tokyo, Japan, in 1999. Carchesio explains: ‘One day I saw a leaf on the footpath near where the flat was, and for the sake of doing something, I picked it up and brought it up to the apartment. I realised it was such a terrific thing to do — it was like a ‘de-stressing’, because it was a very concentrated look at the leaf and the shadow. After a very heavy day of walking and looking and dealing with an extremely large metropolis . . . it was terrific to come back and meditate on this simple thing . . . Wherever I would go, instead of taking a photograph or a postcard, I would pick up a leaf right where I found it and the whole day’s journey would be repeated in my mind while I was doing [the painting of] that leaf.' (1)
Carchesio’s choice of medium — watercolour — allows him to depict the dead leaves with subtlety and precision. Its transparent qualities also emphasise the impermanent nature of the leaves, which inevitably crumble and decay. Carchesio completed the related work Dead leaves of Brisbane 1999 in a similar way on his return to Brisbane. 1. Quoted in David Burnett, 'In conversation with Eugene Carchesio', Artlines, Spring 2002, p.12. List of works in APT 2002 Artists and Works Print friendly version |
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