Adam Cullen’s Ghosts

There are ghosts aplenty on these walls. There are ghosts of other artists and ghosts of emotions gone awry, ghosts of dead animals and ghosts of dead emotions.

Indeed, Adam Cullen’s work has always exuded an element of the uncanny, the sense that he sees a different world than you and I. The colours are all wrong, the most basic subject takes on a hallucinogenic shimmer. It is as though Cullen’s nervous system glows with irradiated heat, which is then transferred to the canvas with a toxic energy.

One of the ghosts on these walls is that of Sir Sidney Nolan. At one stage of his career Nolan began creating unnerving portraits of stricken explorers. Here Adam Cullen resurrects one of these figures, disinterring the corpse in dark colours. This is a figure that has traversed the gates of hell, a figure that has been beaten dark by the inevitable sun blast of the desert.

This is an Australia that ignites thoughts of apocalypse, of dry heat and deformed mammals. Cullen is a distinctly Australian artist, informed by the skulls of dehydration. Throughout his career, alongside his brash painting, he has dabbled with sculpture and installation and here he presents his findings. Living in the bush he collects the detritus of death. The skulls of wombats and humans find equal currency in his world, whether the results of bushfire or gunshot, everything becomes bone and dust. His paint bleeds like the results of arterial injury, his sculptures are the stuff of the mausoleum and morgue. Death imbues his every touch.

There is one work here that jars. For Cullen to create a literal momento mori is telling. He wears a scar down his torso that would leave Frankenstein ashamed. He carries a bullet imbedded in his gut. Cullen has good reason to consider notions of mortality. But here his death’s head is rendered literally, a tarnished skull, a relic of ancient ritual. Last year Cullen was included in a major exhibition in Brisbane titled New Goth, alongside such artists as Dale Frank and Susan Norrie. But the trend towards the ‘gothic’ in contemporary Australian art is old news to Cullen. He is not a ‘fashionable’ artist, he has always sought out the jugular with a savage, visceral force. His dogs are ridden with rabies, his humans are haunted, spectral and gaunt, gazing back at the viewer from the next world.

Cullen’s massive survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Let’s Get Lost, in 2008 more than proved the point. He is not an artist who has embraced the abject for the sake of shock or provocation. He is an artist who was born into the abject, who has embraced detritus and decay like inbred cousins. He mates with demons to give molten birth to his damnable children, a brethren of true outsiders. Welcome to his nightmare.