John Olsen at the AGNSW
Art in America April 1993
Robert Berlind
During an early sojourn in Europe between 1957 and 1960, Australian painter John Olsen absorbed the influences of, among others, Hayter, Dubuffet, COBRA artists Lucebert, Jorn and Alechinsky, and Tapies. His work also shows affinities with Far Eastern art and demonstrates an interest in literature, particularly such Anglo-Celtic writers as Yeats, Thomas, Joyce and Beckett. But this retrospective of his paintings revealed an oeuvre that could only have been produced within the Australian context. He has taken as his chief subject the Australian landscape, and he has given expression to aspirations that permeate much of Australian culture. His acute evocations of local wildlife, Aussie larrikins (roguish outlaw types) and the immense, intractable landmass itself constitute an art that is regional but in no sense provincial.
A typical Olsen painting combines an implied aerial view with an ambiguous and seemingly unpremediated figuration. His characteristically quizzical line and irregular squiggles and dots deftly render countless organisms, large and minute. Their environment is conjured through loosely brushed and stained expanses of color (on canvas or hardboard) that are keyed to natural light. Even when he is referring to the outback landscape, usually noted for its austerity and inhospitality, Olsen's imagery teems with life. Yet the same lines sometimes read as geological mappings. In Olsen's work there is no foreground/ middle ground/ background schema, nor any sign of European landscape's concern with "human scale." Instead he employs simultaneously the contrary vantages of naturalist and geographer or, to put it another way, the viewpoints of frog and eagle.
Olsen is a master watercolorist--witness a series of large works (often around 8 feet high) on Japanese torinoko paper with titles such as The Rookery, Dying Creek Bed and Owls at Cooper's Creek. These exquisite and humorous paintings bear comparison with the best of the Zen sumi tradition without ever striking a false note. Another group of paintings, begun in 1987 and dominated by tar blacks and heavy umbers, adumbrates themes of Spanish village life, literary references and autobiographical probings, all in a tragicomic mode. A purely Olsen touch appears in the darkness that is animated by scrawly images in Donde Voy? Self-Portraits in Moments of Doubt: a squidgy little fried egg, hovering in space where one of the figure's genitals would be in a fuller rendering, refers playfully to Velazquez, a symbol of redemption and a particular not-quite-cooked bit of breakfast.
Olsen's work has not yet been seen in the U.S., yet this retrospective would more than hold its own at any of our major venues.