Motion Pictures Nellie Castan gallery, Melbourne June 2004

by Andrew Gaynor

The road is the time-honoured metaphor on which to hang tales of a person’s journey towards enlightenment. It is the endless ribbon, sometimes marked but often hidden, which draws travellers to their destiny. Even with a fixed destination, the mere act of wandering is seen to have it’s own purpose by loosening up the mind, allowing free thought or indulging deep reflection. In this, the road seems there by default.

Tony Lloyd understands this and Like many Australians, allows himself time out just to get in his car and drive, somewhat aimlessly, through the backroads of Australia. These are mostly night journeys where the bitumen is illuminated only as fas as the edge of the headlights, the white line weaving a hypnotic spell on Lloyd as he concentrates on the tarmac. The nightlights become his companions, from the moon to the stars to the distant illumination around townships. And to record it all sits his trusty camcorder, strapped to the passenger side.

It is paintings derived from these recorded images that form the basis for the exhibition Motion Pictures. As its title implies these are both fragments from a journey and allusions to the cinematic. Like classic film noir, the richly glazed and inky hues are suffused with deep colour (black does not actually appear on Lloyd’s palette). The paintings have enigmatic names like Tuesday, Lux Aeterna, Silver, A Moment of Clarity, and read like storyboards with trees stretching past as clouds part to hint at the moon. And there, snaking through the majority, lies that endless strip of tar, the ‘lost’ highway of David Lynch.

In the studio, Lloyd manipulates stills from the videos via photoshop, removing distractions and reducing the images to their ontological source, ideally with just three elements left. It is a process reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti’s statement about the resulting gauntness of his sculptures ‘the more I remove, the bigger it gets’.1 Indeed, a painting like Silver- a lone pine tree, silhouetted against receding hills, its peak quivering in the night air – says so much in its simplicity than another muddied by some human activity or anecdote in the foreground (an annoying practice in the otherwise sublime works of one of Lloyd’s influences, Caspar David Friedrich).

Mindful of Warhol’s beguiling comment that what makes a painting beautiful is the way the paints put on,2 it is important to acknowledge Tony Lloyd’s technique in it’s seamless fusion with it’s subject. Like an alchemist with base metal, Lloyd transmutes the paint into something potent. Rather than building up an image in brush marks and layers, his technique is reductive; he cuts back into the paint surface using cotton buds. This creates blurred and feathered edges where darkness and implied light hover in a fugitive dance. The success or otherwise of this method relies on the speed with which the paint dries (being a chemical reaction rather than on influenced by temperature). Through practice, Lloyd has discovered that mixing on hue with another causes the drying to accelerate; mixing another two causes the opposite.3 research and illusion reach symbiosis in his craft.

The artist tells an eerie tale of driving down Los Angeles’ Mulholland Drive in the fog, being spooked by headlights that seemed to have no earthly source. David Lynch’s filmic vision pops up many times in conversations with Lloyd and it is inevitable that comparisons are made.4 However, Lloyd is a far more complex thinker than this, citing sources as far ranging as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Cocteau’s Orphee, throught to Friedrich, Hopper, Ruscha and the cinematic notion of ‘the road’ in Mad Max. overlaying this is a deep religious understanding, the legacy of growing up a Catholic.These influences all fuse together in Tibidabo, a burnt Sienna vision of the nightlights of LA. In Spain a tibidabo is a high vantage-point on the outskirts fromwhere visitors are invited to view a host’s city. Its source is biblical, being the mountaintop where Satan tempted Christ in the wilderness with visions of the world’s cities, offering him dominion if jesus knelt down before him. And what more tempting Babel of the modern world than the physical home of Hollywood? Yet Lloyd is too sharp to be seduced. Recognising that LA is one god-awful ugly city by day, he chooses the night view, when the city is marked by lights and jewels. In the centre is a light flare, a phenomena which threatens to envelop the vision, like a scene out of Ghostbusters. There is an implicit tension between the light that illuminates the city and that which transforms it into the celluloid simulacra so seductive to its inhabitants.

For all this, Motion Pictures is an exhibition grouded by a sense of optimism. There remains within the viewer a point-of-view awareness that these fragmentary stills are part of a greater whole, a narrative with a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Our eyes may see only as far as the headlights will allow but we should never abandon hope.

© Andrew Gaynor 2004

1 Quoted in David Sylvester Looking at Giacometti, Pimlico, London, 1995.
2 Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Picador, Great Britain, 1975, p. 66.
3 Lloyd’s recent discovery that the addition of essential clove oil delays the drying process adds a further exotic scent to his work.
4 Whilst in the US, Lloyd met Barry Gifford, the author of Lost Highway. Gifford remains bemused by fans who come up and offer solutions to his and Lynch’s weird screenplay. Gifford is as mystified as the fans as to what the film may mean.