ANNALISA FERRARIS | ANTI-ROMANCE CHINA HEIGHTS
As a child, Annalisa Ferraris had a fascination for abandoned buildings.
Growing up in Sydney’s lower North Shore, with its veneer of leafy calm, she
sensed these sites of urban disintegration offered glimpses into things liminal,
into ambiguities ordinarily veiled by society. She found them disturbing,
compelling and beautiful. And they fixed in her a taste for boundary
phenomena.
Today, Ferraris is a National Art School Graduate and Brett Whitely
Scholarship Finalist, preparing for a solo exhibition at China Heights gallery, in
Sydney. Fittingly, her paintings, broadly landscapes and still lifes, conjure
liminal zones, places of ambiguity, of marginal behaviours and temporary
habitation.
As an exhibiting artist of several years, Ferraris’s aesthetic is distinctive and
deeply rooted in art history. While apparently simple, it bridges contrary
tendencies. At one end is hard-edged and colour field abstraction, the other,
affixed to representative subject matter. This impossible project has a
precedent.
David Hockney’s, A Bigger Splash (1967), instantiates the enterprise.
Ferraris, like Hockney, constructs her representations from hard-eged fields of
colour, where the brushstrokes are rarely expressed. But unlike Hockney’s
ironic celebration of superficiality, Ferraris admits an inward turn. She credits
Edward Hopper (the 20th century American realist, who blithely disregarded
abstraction his entire career) as one of her heroes. His influence reveals in
her a fascination with built environments as places of estrangement. Also like
Hopper, Ferraris’ paintings are windows into private worlds. But unlike the
American realist, Ferraris’ images metaphorise inner experiences and thus
enter surrealist territory. The more one looks at her empty pools, gaping like
pastel blue graves, the more one perceives the silent and shadowy dystopian
space of the great Italian surrealist, Georgio de Chirico (1888-1978).
Like much surrealist painting, Ferraris’ depiction of light is highly ambiguous. It
is impossible to discern if the sun is rising or setting. Aiding this ambiguity is
the absence of merrymakers and workers alike. Fundamental signifiers, then,
of seasons and social hierarchies have been expunged as if by a high-
pressure hose or an act of God, leaving an unlikely coupling of hard-edged
abstract purity imbued with realist references to low-rent pleasure and road-
trip bravado. It’s a Vegas of the mind awash with irony.
The irony is deepened by Ferraris’ imprecise use of single point perspective
(the diagonals don’t always recede to the same vanishing point). It
compromises the mathematic rationalism of the pictorial space, giving it a
faintly inebriated feel, as though Ferraris has veered across the double yellow
lines and found herself more at ease on the wrong side of the road. Out there,
in the hinterland, on her mythic highway of candy-coloured horrors and boozy
hope, rules are negotiable.
Ferraris’ still lifes deepen this cosmos of kitsch ambiguity by leaning toward
realism and therefore purging the picture plain of metaphor. While human
subjects, in accordance with the genre, remain absent, evidence of their
comings and goings are comically and poetically rendered. On a table are
oyster shells and stubbed out cigarettes butts, while an emptied cigarette
packet stands on its end casting a shadow like a building or a cardboard
coffin. The oyster, in the Dutch still life tradition symbolises aphrodisiacs and
temptation. Thus Ferraris’ irreverent erotics effortlessly unite the Classical still
life with the poetics of the road. The post-coital suggestion of a consumed
oyster and spent smoke in a cheap motel is both concise and funny.
Ferraris’ oeuvre, by activating the mythology of the road and suburban
dystopias, leverages the tropes of popular culture against a playful
engagement with art history. Her balancing act constructs a liminal zone that
is at once familiar and poetically charged. Her settings are those places you
pass through on the way to somewhere else. It seems Ferraris, by
aestheticising the periphery, invites us to reconsider the status quo.
Paul Lyndon.
