Paul Gundry

The Rosella Episode
61 x 76cm
Hadley Art Prize 2017 Finalist

SOLD

In The Sky Of History 2017
Oil on linen
96 x 152cm
$4,500
Finalist Glover 2017

SOLD

The Quiet Land 2016
Oil on Linen
30 x 45cm
$1,350

SOLD

Sanctuary 2016
oil on linen
41 x 61cm
$1,800

SOLD

Supernatural 2016

In titling this show Supernatural, I am looking to lend the work an inflection toward ideas that have long accompanied my work but which are perhaps only subtly apparent. I would like the viewer to come to regard the objects and structures – vehicles, dwellings, power-poles and wheelie-bins - of everyday suburbia as having a persona, like any other being. The paintings in this show are based on photos taken on a number of frosty mornings in the Winter of 2013. In most of the pictures, the houses could be said to be ‘staring’ at the sun, but the nature of their gaze is somewhat vacant and enigmatic, prompting questions - was something taken, or received in the night, spirited away with the fog? There appears to be a persona, but it is enigmatic and difficult to describe, like initiates in a trance, waiting for a sign, or instruction - awaiting the return. In a sense, these paintings are portraits as much as suburban landscapes. There is nothing notably abnormal in my portrayals of suburbia - in fact everything most likely appears perfectly natural, as though there were really nothing to see. It is my intention that the excessive banality of the landscapes will only serve to heighten a sense of apprehension and curiosity, as though there were something suspect or secretive in the unassuming and the everyday. But rather than dwell on the supernatural and the occult, I want the pictures to open out to more general, philosophical considerations pertaining to the nature of reality, and questions of being, existence, and consciousness – a conversation in the realm of metaphysics, Aristotle, and Existentialism. The spectre of the supernatural and the occult hovers as a challenge to common sense realism. Photorealism has its feet, apparently, firmly on the ground of matter and common sense, but the appearance of the fog, lurking in the background, shrouding the suburbs, interrupts the equilibrium of the mundane and routine procession of the day-to-day. We also speak of photos that “look painted”, and as such, problematize any wish we may have to take reality for granted – and that there is a natural mode of knowing in contrast with an artificial, distorted view of reality. Our apprehension of reality is, more or less, the image we have of it in our head., and while we may not be able to challenge the idea that reality exists independently of our sensory perception, we can only ever know it as the image we have of it, which is to say that the reality we know is always already an artificial construct, and, in a sense, always already supernatural – and perception as a sort of stage-craft. The clear sunlight that Illuminates the suburbs on the characteristically cool and fog-laden mornings leave the subject of my pictures somewhere between clarity and obscurity, the fabulous and the mundane, the known and the mysterious, certainty and doubt.