DISTANCE Michael Carr Art Dealer, Sydney March 2005

by Andrew Gaynor

If man has learnt anything of value from his search for understanding it is that his knowledge is only a fraction of the knowable and that what he doesn’t know is in all probability more important than what he knows. Unless we become gods we can never understand completely.

James Gleeson, ‘In Defence of the Abstract’, Sun, Sydney, 28 April 1963.

It is hard not to be haunted by twilight, that crepuscular zone where all is dim and unenlightened. Where one is at a distance from physical reality as details fog out in the half-light gloom.

Suffused with anticipation, it is as if the world has taken a deep breath and hushed itself. We are left hanging – on edge, in its thrall and not always sure of what we see. A place of imagination, this can be a zone of monsters and of revelation.

Tony Lloyd’s paintings are encounters with this world. Like de-populated stills from a brooding film noir classic, each image is a site of mysterious possibility. Roads vanish into night, cities pinprick with floating lights, a bridge looms overhead. The viewer gazes up, the viewer gazes down. It is exalted but one hesitates to call it sublime.
For we know that the light of day may reveal an unpalatable truth. Nightlight gives us magic, daylight gives us stone. And concrete. And dust. Remember that Turner’s blazing sunsets were only possible due to the grime of the Industrial Revolution. Likewise, Lloyd’s image of this bridge may be the silhouette of an audacious arc, but its reality is a location amidst exhausted parklands on the verge of splintered industry.
This is in no way meant to take away from the velvet of these paintings. It is merely an attempt to articulate what Tony Lloyd is giving us. Like a transmuter or an alchemist, he transforms the base metal of our vision. Where distance becomes a measurement of proximity, where the tangible becomes intangible.

© Andrew Gaynor 2005