Passages Arc One, Melbourne 2000

by Paul Atkinson

Tony Lloyd ‘s recent exhibition serves as a guide to a neglected part of the urban landscape, the passage. Those quiet moments of the urban, the silences we experience when walking the streets at night, or traversing an empty corridor. Those gaps in the visual field that promise so much, but contain so little. The passage occupies an unusual place in the urban imagination because it is always passed through but never arrived at. It is the netherworld of the “in between”. It may be incidental like the gap between two buildings; as transitory as the passage opened up by a car’s headlights or it may be as permanent as a tunnel. In each case the passage does not house or contain people or things, rather it acts as a vehicle for their transmission. As a subject of a painting it raises a number of difficulties because it exists at the margin of the representable. For at the heart of a passage is an absence, a space that cannot be filled but only gestured toward. Lloyd’s works succeed in representing the liminal space of the passage because they allow this absence to speak, there are no figures, characters or objects to hold the viewer’s gaze only the faint glow of light reflected off a wall, roof, floor or road. But it is precisely this absence that draws the viewer closer. The eye follows the line of the passage trying to locate its end but does not succeed in finding an object, a conclusion to its movement, only indistinct shadows lurking on the edge of vision. A process that is accentuated through Lloyd’s persistent use of perspectival lines that serve to contain the space and yet suggest the direction of its continuation. These works explore the limits of the visible through those objects that border the visible.

All the works use proximate light sources such as rows of fluorescent lights, dimmed bulbs in a corridor, light reflected from behind a partition, car headlights etc., to illuminate the margins of the passage. The evenness of natural light is eschewed as it reveals too much about the shape of the passage. By contrast, the multiple positions of point source light reshape the passage, creating unexpected contours and shapes. Moreover, they reveal the artist’s debt to cinema and television as both mediums paint the landscape with light rather than letting the objects speak for themselves. There is a certain reference to the use of light in film noir and the structuring of interiors in films such as, Alphaville, Barton Fink and Being John Malkovich. Light that either obscures the boundary of objects, through the use of chiaroscuro or light that brings together figure and ground within its oppressive artificial glow. These points of light also draw the viewer into the picture – reinforcing the perspective – and creating the illusion of depth with the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel effect similar to that found in the above mentioned Being John Malkovich. In addition to the shaping of the image through illumination, there is an examination of how light changes through its reproduction in various media. How the quality of the light is relative to the instrument that registers it. In Metastasis, we see a train tunnel bathed in a yellowish green hue: a colour that is evocative of the way that a photograph reconstitutes fluorescent light. In other works there is a bleaching of the various light sources that is similar to the reproduction of artificial light in the video camera image. Lloyd, however, does not simply reproduce the video image but creates a hybrid image that combines the clarity of direct perception with the distortion of the mediated image. The viewer is involved in an experiment in mediation in that the various ways of seeing – video, photography, film, the painting - are incorporated into the representation of a single subject.
In some of his earlier works, Lloyd experimented with the surface of the image through unevenly applying varnish or marking the canvas. In this series, however, he has flattened the surface of the painting using a strong matte finish and a fine varnish to ensure that the viewer is drawn to nothing else than the spaces within the painting. The viewer is taken into the narrative space of the image as if it were a screen. Unfortunately, the white walls of the gallery diminished this effect as they offered too much of a contrast to the muted colours of the paintings. The artist was obviously conscious of this problem as he bordered a couple of the works, most notably Intrada, with black panels joined to the main image on the horizontal line, to give the viewer the impression that they are looking at a screen similar to that found in home entertainment systems. In other works he has black bands bordering the image on the vertical plane in the style of widescreen cinema. There is even a similarity between the aspect ratios of the paintings and those used in film and television. The use of screen references in the lighting, design and shape of the paintings forces the viewer to reflect on their own viewing practice. The paintings viewed from a distance seem to offer depth, we look into the dark passages, but when examined closely the screen-like depth gives way to the opacity of the painted surface. In the presentation of the works at Span gallery, the majority of viewers maintained a distance from the painted surface, not willing to relinquish the televisual illusion. This is hardly surprising, as the opening night crowd were largely from a generation weaned on television, the Internet and film.

Viewing artworks in a gallery is quite distinct from watching film. When we examine a painting, we move forward and back, peruse its edges and generally scan the image. We are forced to take an active role in its reception. In contrast, cinema and television are concerned with the moving image, the static border of the screen houses a succession of images. Shots, cells, scenes pass before the viewer, rather than the viewer seeking those images. There is a flickering of presence and absence in the frame – what we see one moment will soon be lost, an empty landscape will soon be filled. For the viewer there is a virtual rather than an actual movement in each image fuelled by the expectancy of change. In short, the viewer is someone who waits rather than observes.

Passages explores this passivity in two ways, firstly through recreating on canvas the cinematic/televisual illusion and, secondly, through the depiction of empty streets, tunnels and corridors. The viewer stands before the image as if it were a screen, waiting for the next image to appear. The empty passages reinforce this expectancy as they function like an establishing shot in film; they set the scene where the action will take place. The long shot of a train tunnel will soon make way for a train; the beams of the car’s headlight will come to illuminate the solitary figure of a hitchhiker. In the painting, Epitasis, we stand before a corridor partially lit by a series of dim lights. Asymmetrical black panels border the image to enhance the feeling that we are looking into the image, spying and waiting for something to happen. They could also represent the beginnings of a “wipe”, frozen in the moment when the next image comes to take its place. We are looking into what could be the first shot of a film, the one that defines the space of the virtual world. We are passive in that we have no control over what could come next, what could come out of the shadows. There is no choice but to examine key points in the images, to discern what could come out of the darkness, what will make its way out of the passageways. At the same time, the viewer expects that a door may be opened and we will see inside a room, the long shot of the corridor will give way to a medium shot revealing two people involved in a domestic dispute. But the painting does not change, it does not reveal anything rather it promises change and the viewer can do nothing but wait to see if the promise will be fulfilled.

Passages is the latest installment in Tony Lloyd’s exploration of the urban landscape. This series differs from the earlier works in that there is a consistent examination of the relationship between screen culture and the urban. He alerts us to fact that we cannot look at city streets, passageways, and highways naively, directly, in themselves. They are always seen through the popular genres of film noir, the police drama and the road movie. Lloyd has effortlessly incorporated this televisual/filmic sensibility into his work through the creation of what could easily be film stills, shots from a yet to be made movie. The work is contemporary in that it embraces the virtual world through creating a stylistic pastiche of the photographic, televisual and cinematic image. At the same time, such styles are defamiliarised in the stillness of the canvas and the discrete space of the gallery.

© Paul Atkinson 2000