My paintings are the arena where I chase, tear, pull apart, manipulate, destroy, lose, show and hide, dissolve, disappear, die; look for that again and find it, and do it again and again and again, and again.
I give some news about the world.
As an Australian citizen and a painter preoccupied with the land-scape, amid the kind of battle described above, I cannot help but thinking about Philip Jones as he says in his last book Ochre and Rust , gazing at the land in front of him stretching until Lake Torrens: “the profound calm of this scene seems to deny history, the fabric torn since the first encounters (…)”.
From one battle to another, my paintings witness that ambiguity expressed here. It “seems”, therefore nothing is less sure. It seems calm but at which cost, and for whom? Whose story is it? – and going to be? In that line, i want my landscape to produce something disharmonious but stable, as well as infinite and frightening, intimate and fragile as a response to the self-satisfying, manufactured environment we keep on creating and live in.
If to Marcel Proust, “the journey needs new eyes rather than new horizons”, then Lakes MUNGO and ARUMPO, with their seemingly repetitive eroded patterns and apparent bareness, deserve for a while that detour of giving some news.
Christophe Stibio © March/April 2009
I give some news about the world.
As an Australian citizen and a painter preoccupied with the land-scape, amid the kind of battle described above, I cannot help but thinking about Philip Jones as he says in his last book Ochre and Rust , gazing at the land in front of him stretching until Lake Torrens: “the profound calm of this scene seems to deny history, the fabric torn since the first encounters (…)”.
From one battle to another, my paintings witness that ambiguity expressed here. It “seems”, therefore nothing is less sure. It seems calm but at which cost, and for whom? Whose story is it? – and going to be? In that line, i want my landscape to produce something disharmonious but stable, as well as infinite and frightening, intimate and fragile as a response to the self-satisfying, manufactured environment we keep on creating and live in.
If to Marcel Proust, “the journey needs new eyes rather than new horizons”, then Lakes MUNGO and ARUMPO, with their seemingly repetitive eroded patterns and apparent bareness, deserve for a while that detour of giving some news.
Christophe Stibio © March/April 2009
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