Gareth Sansom: Sensorial Overload

It is hard to imagine, given the cornucopia of cultural references in this brain-crunching, sensorial-overloaded exhibition that the artist claims that he was once aggressively anti-intellectual when it came to painting. But Gareth Sansom has never been predictable when it comes to his work – at least apart from the fact that there are always surprises.

In his 2007 exhibition at the John Buckley Gallery, Sansom pulled out all the stops. Aesthetically it jangles and jars, only to abruptly change gear and find moments of clarity and contemplation. It was a minefield of ideas, with cameo appearances by John Milton, Ingmar Bergman, Sebastian Brant, Jean-Luc Godard and Dr Fu Manchu. It embraces figuration, abstraction, graffiti, text and photography. There are references to Christianity and Buddhism, bondage and transvestitism, poetry and cinema. The resulting morass suggests a teeming, crawling intelligence and a confidence in line, form and colour that is all too rare in Australian art.

This was Sansom’s first show since his massive survey show at the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art in 2005. The survey revealed an artist who has tirelessly plundered the detritus of popular culture, pushing his aesthetics towards an almost demented, heretical notion of bad taste. But, as the survey revealed, circa 2000 a new confidence in colour and hints of minimalist fields began to dominate his oeuvre. A more contemplative artist emerged from the fires of a punk-aesthetic overdrive.

That is not to say the fire has gone out. Elements of the anarchist remain in fine form in the latest show. One of the first works to be seen entering the gallery was, at first glance, unfinished, a mess. At least a quarter of Painting 101 was roughly sprayed, the kind of graffiti that a glue-sniffing jerk creates just to make a mark.

“What I wanted to do is attack the canvas in the rawest possible way where aesthetics went out the window and the only way I knew how was by using cheap enamel spray-cans,” says the artist. “I was being quite perverse.”

“You can do wonderful things with spray-cans, but I wanted nasty, at random marks all over the canvas which is directly opposed to the old masters’ tradition – and what an ugly sight it was. Given I had put up this pretty obnoxious camouflage it took me a few days and nights to work out how to proceed.”

Sansom chose what he describes as “an aesthetically pleasing” colour, a variation on Naples Yellow and Cadmium Yellow and proceeded to paint out much of the “camouflage.” He was determined to keep some of the anarchic spray and covered a fifth of the background with newspaper, leaving a strange jagged shape to work from using a “traditional, abstract expressionist mode.”

“It actually works.”

Seeing that work in the studio before the exhibition it was not difficult to have doubts about Sansom’s eccentricity, if not his sanity. Once hung in the gallery however the work clearly came together. “It takes on the conventions of a finished work in an exhibition,” he says.

Sansom added a more figurative element snatched from his massive 2005 opus Sweeney Agonistes, which had exhibited at the Ian Potter. “A kind of mad Flintstones’ house balancing precariously on a weird plinth but I’ve turned the Flintstones’ hut into a form that resembles an early iMac or a television.”

At the base of the plinth the Grim Reaper approaches, clearly about to bring the whole structure down. The presence of Death and the hints of mortality resound throughout the show like a troubling shadow.

“There are links, especially with the painting, The Seventh Seal, in which the knight is returning from the Crusades and finds himself on a beach playing for his life a game of chess with Death. The knight believes that if he can beat Death in the game then he will cheat Death, but the irony is, of course, that Death cheats him.”

Sansom’s Seventh Seal is an enormous painting of medieval and gothic imagery. Sansom first saw Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal at the old Savoy cinema in 1962 with fellow artists Robert Jacks and George Baldessin and has watched it innumerable times since. The strange, cinematic impact of the work reflects one aspect of Sansom’s working practice. He has two studios, one a bright, naturally lit studio in Sorrento, the other a small, claustrophobic space in his home in the inner-city. In the latter studio he will often work at night, taking breaks to watch films. From where he watches television in the dark he can see the works in progress in his brightly lit studio. Inevitably there are times when there is a cross-over between what he watches and what he paints. While far from a literal quotation, one can see the dark, plague-ridden world depicted by Bergman or the gnarled trees from the cinematic versions of Wuthering Heights or Sleepy Hollow in Sansom’s canvases. “I do love that Gothic stuff,” he admits.

The theme of the Grim Reaper is accompanied by a sense of quest or journey, figures on the move through dark landscapes reminiscent of a New Orleans Funeral or a death march in barren European landscapes. “It’s even a bit of Pied Piper,” he says. “In life the weak get led, by any means, it might be media, it might be sex, drugs or rock’n’roll…” Such figures are eerily depicted in the painting The End where black silhouettes march towards a stygian black shack, their fate anyone’s guess.

Sansom is now 68 and admits there have been times that he has been led astray. “You look back and you realise what a powerful force something can be when people don’t understand it. In history, when you look at religion and you look at the inquisition and the purges, you realise that people were led on a voyage but they had no idea what the implications of that voyage might have been.”
This goes some way to explaining the painting Ship of Fools (Hello Sailor!). The painting is loosely based on the moralistic 1494 poem Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) by the German humanist Sebastian Brant in which he listed 110 varied follies and vices. In his painting Sansom’s ship-mates are juxtaposed by a disturbing hooded female figure.

Arguably the major work in the exhibition was Samson Agonistes. A remarkably bold painting, it is based loosely on the John Milton poem of the same title which recounts the travails of Samson who has been blinded by the Philistines and held captive in a prison in Gaza. Sansom goes so far as to quote sections of Milton’s prose. He also included photography, as he did in two other paintings.

“I am an avid computer enthusiast and fluent in HTML and running my own website as well, so I do a lot of roaming on the Net,” he says. “Somewhere I came across these very realistic latex female masks that fit over your head and lace up super-tight and your only vision is two pin holes. I thought ‘who would want these damn masks?’ Anyway, I got one and I put it on and it was so damn tight and I thought, God, if I have a heart attack with this thing on, imagine being found by the cleaning lady!”

“So I decided I would use these masks and I created an alternate persona in which I would strap on a latex vagina and so on. I just thought it would be totally bizarre and really edgy. I didn’t want it to look opportunistic.” Sansom dropped the photographs into Photoshop to adjust the colours to match the paintings so that at first one barely notices them.

Samson Agonistes plays on numerous aspects of the artist’s life, going back to primary school when his nick-name was the rather bizarre “Samson and Delilah.”

“They never pronounced my name properly and even today people always misspell it. So I went and sourced Milton’s poem. Samson has been blinded and is working the treadmill and it’s the stage before he decides to tear the temple down and in this moment of contemplation he’s asking why God made this most important organ – the eyes – so vulnerable? It’s just such a fantastically powerful idea and so the painting evolved around that. Sweeney Agonistes evolved from reading T.S. Eliot and it’s not the way I usually work, but suddenly after reading Milton that painting took on a momentum that it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t brought in the literary aspect.”

“In my earlier days it was always firmly about being anti-intellectual and beating my chest. It seems somewhat foolish now. Nowadays I am open to anything that’s going to make my paintings better. Where I had always relied on spontaneity I’ve realised you have to raise the bar and part of that is intellectually.”