Hart Gallery

• About Gareth Edwards
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Gareth Edwards RWA

In this remarkable collection of new paintings produced in 2008 and 2009, Gareth Edwards presents a series of new “flower” paintings, such as the ‘Blooms’ and the ‘Flower Heads’ (oil on canvas framed under glass) as well as several major paintings inspired by the sea and landscape, providing a link to previous shows. Many of these environmental evocations still display what Nicholas Usherwoood has called “an intense humanism” in his review and essay for Gareth Edwards’s last show and a “luminescence and spatial quality that evokes Turner at his most abstract” as Laura Gascoigne has said of Gareth Edwards's paintings. These lyrical essays on land and seascape make profound artistic statements but it is with the newer flower paintings that Gareth Edwards breaks his mould, avoiding the sort of pitfalls that go with the genre. These flowers are not decorative or kitsch. They are the logical next step in the artist's career.

There are several major, large works based on single plant forms: Last Tree, Sea Drift, Lachrymae, Black Tulip, Man Flower, Veritas and Thistle Down. All are created in a varied and complex painterly language specific to their needs. The collection, taken together, is like an anthology of poetry where each poem is crafted from the language dictated by the subject. For example, the eponymous subject of the beautiful “Last Tree” is barely visible under a fine network of gauzy white gloss. The tree is distant, evocative and alone, beyond physical grasp but just visible. In "Sea Drift" this tiny, delicate cliff-edge, granite-based, common coastal flower is given centre stage in a huge painting that is bestowed with vigorous brush strokes, splashings, pourings and drippings of sea spray, evoking dramatic painterly significance. The viewer feels physically present, at the base of this little plant with the elements crashing and cascading round about. "Sea Drift" makes a neat response to the Imagist poet H.D. whose "Oread" freezes exactly such a moment of natural history by fusing plant life with the sea in a single image to the point where the reader forgets which is a metaphorical or poetic expression of the other.

Examples drawn from poetry have been used to describe Gareth Edwards’s work for many years. The poet Amanda White has written: “As with exceptional poetry, Edwards brings a fresh and illuminating take on the world around and within us” and “we connect with what we are looking at and into... every painting has an immediacy that insists upon our engagement so that we cannot be anything but complicit.” In other words our engagement in these paintings takes time. "Archaic Garden" is a painting with a warm glow that entices and seduces the viewer into its fictive space. While there, we enjoy a dialogue in the language and stuff of the painting. There are knots of coloured paint, and various surface effects which engage us in the sort of dialogue which is at the heart of many of Gareth Edwards’s paintings, creating a space where time can expand.

This painterly anthology is diverse but coherent. There is a theme running through many of these paintings that draws them together as a group under the title "Man of Flowers." Gareth Edwards has taken his title from a New Zealand film from the 1970’s called "A Man of Flowers." The film is about the relationship between two men. One is a sensitive collector and consumer of beautiful things including exquisite pressed flowers and the music of Donizetti’s opera Lucia Di Lammermoor. The other is an opportunistic, cynical painter of reduced circumstances who was once a macho abstract expressionist at home in the masculine mien of 1970’s Australia where the film is set. This cinematic essay on manhood or male identity unsurprisingly provided Gareth Edwards with the cue for many of his new paintings. This is particularly evident in the title piece, "Man of Flowers." This six foot by five foot painting features a beautiful young man in the fashion of the marathon boy sculpture of ancient Greece with dozens of pink flowers scattering the painting and gathering in profligate ease at the base of the divided and starkly contrasted canvas. The dialectic division of the canvas indicates that the painting wishes to take part in the conversation about masculinity. On one side of the painting there is a large, loosely-painted, luminous palm or thistle-dash plant painted on a darkly-rendered, metallic background; on the other, lighter side of the painting is placed the marathon boy, a paean of youth, strength and masculinity who is asked to co-exist in this painting with dozens of soft pink blooms scattered around him. The contrast brings to mind the sort of subject-versus-style dichotomy and the title of Jean Genet's great novel, "Our Lady of the Flowers." Although it may be tempting to invoke Freud, Jung and Luce Irigaray (all of whom Edwards quotes when talking about this painting) the image is, he says, primarily poetic rather than conceptual or didactic. It is not an idea; it is a stanza of images that coalesce in the viewer’s mind.

Dr Dean James-Robbins