The Colour of The Invisible

The Colour of the Invisible

Jerry Bobsien

Catalogue Essay to the Exhibition “The Colour of the Invisible”, Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, June to September 2020

Leo Cremonese
Colour of the Invisible
curated by Mariam Abboud Dubbo Regional Gallery

I make art because I am alive
I am consciousness and consciousness is a creative impulse.
I think that’s enough of a reason – Leo Cremonese.

Leo Cremonese is a performer without an audience on country that is not his. A surfer landlocked and moving with purpose through the volcanic rocks, sandstone and bush of Wiradjuri country like he would the Ocean. He says making art is his way of passing the time between surfs. I don’t buy this for a minute.

On any given day, Cremonese will be hurling himself up and over an aggregate rockface or plunging his head into Carwell Creek. Sometimes he’ll take materials, paper or canvas and mark them with the immediacy of the mud, charcoal or soil of his travels. It is not a gentle meander or a hike. Some of these rituals are secret, the artist not quite willing to share the conscious eccentricity of it all. Cremonese performs his own private shamanism with one outcome in mind: to remove himself from his body and experience the landscape in a way that will translate into colour on canvas.

These are rituals Cremonese enacts with more than a nod to aspects of the Hindu tradition of Vedanta, Zen Buddhism and the memory of his spirit animal and zen guide, his beloved cattle dog Penny. The rituals are his own intensely personal and physical interrogation of the bush and country he now considers home. He is very aware that this land is not his, he is walking on Dabee land in Wiradjuri country, “I will always do this with respect,” he says. “The stories in this country are not mine. I am trying to connect in some way to a place I now call home. My own country where I was born is dead. I don’t have a country to call my own.”

When Leo makes his way through the undulating plateau of the Clandulla forest, or the bush near Combimelong, he is not a passive artist. There are no en plein air affectations in his kit. Leo moves through the bush seeking a closer physical connection between his body and the creek, the trees, the sky he draws energy from. He is enthusiastically preoccupied with the elemental aspects of being human. For Leo, this means “sitting somewhere between the erotic impulse and suffering, to inhabit a place between your bodily physicality and your spirituality.” [i]

Curated by Mariam Abboud, the Colour of the Invisible is an installation of paintings and sculptures made by the artist following a series of physical and meditative experiences within the bush around Kandos NSW. The exhibition pushes Cremonese’s paintings further along from the experimental work he produced for Cementa in 2019 and into a formal space at the Dubbo Regional Gallery. Alongside all this talk of shamanism and wordly energy, what we see in the Colour of the Invisible is a joyous abstraction of the bushland of the Central West. The work is wild with colour. Tongbong Mountain vibrates out of a canvas of vivid pink and orange, a painting made 15 years earlier in a different life, emerges out of a corner pasted on as a mini-prophetic version of its now bigger, grander parent. For Cremonese, these colours appear as synaesthesic notes in the landscape. He can’t experience the energy of the bush without seeing that Orange as an image of Tongbong.  

I surfed with Leo in the tropical waters of Papua New Guinea and it was here I first encountered the full extent of his painterly nerdiness. Colour, musicality and energy fuel Leo’s practice. Cremonese was born in a small rural town north of Rio De Janeiro. His family moved to Australia in 1983 where he finished high school and went onto complete his bachelor and master’s degree in fine art at the University of New South Wales. He was awarded a four-year scholarship by the Tim Olsen Gallery to enhance his oil painting techniques and drawing practice with Charlie Sheard. This training comes through in any conversation about colour with Leo. While on a boat travelling to a reef off Manus Island, I asked Leo about the colour of the water. I had never seen anything like it. Purple? Indigo? For the next few minutes, Leo provided great detail of the technical composition and process of laying down this colour in paint. I now understand you need a good base of Venetian Red before you get anywhere near a deep ocean Papuan New Guinean blue. Leo Cremonese has a heightened understanding of the role and impact of colour in our lives. He uses it as a tool to establish a strong connection with his audience.

There are interesting contradictions in this exhibition and within Leo’s practice of his bushland rituals. While he is trying so intently to get out of his body in the landscape, his physicality (and ours) is embedded in this installation.  Several of these works contain traces of his ritual, roughly sewn rocks and objects from the forest floor. Dirt, ash, ochres, charcoal and water layered onto the surface of the canvas. Branches and feathers, intwined with fabric and rope, painted fabric draped onto the branches of trees from the Clandulla Forest. All coloured with the same vibrant palette of his paintings, orange, pink, teal, red and purple. These are not the colours of the bush, they are representations of the feeling Cremonese gets when he spends enough time in the landscape. He sees this quite literally in a kind of synaesthesic moment along with the repeated motif of spots that are drawn and painted on many surfaces in the installation. We are invited to climb into spaces he has created to make us even more aware of our own body when viewing the installation. This sensorial approach is critical to the way Cremonese works and what he wants us to experience. In Dubbo, I crawled into a large plywood box and folded my legs beneath me. It was dark but for the opening I entered. The cavity provides a window onto the painted fabric Leo has sewn together with a measured and meditative hand. I see nothing of the Kandos landscape but I know I feel something of it. A containment, a shelter and a fear of my place in the vastness of it all.

While this installation is both of this world (the mud, the ash, the rocks) and not (the ghost of Penny, the looming orange apparition of Tongbong, the Dionysian forms in his drawings); it invites us to feel our own way through the bush. In part this is gothic and dark, in others a feeling of meditative calm. This reaction and response is something Cremonese will continue to explore. He is already thinking of new ways to push his process with a significant collaboration with contemporary dancer Susan Barling in a project that will continue to offer us a new experience of the Australian landscape.

 Gerry Bobsien

[i][i] Leo Cremonese interviewed by Mariam Abboud, Western Plains Cultural Centre 2020.

Into The Essence of Things: Leo Cremonese's Perceptions

Into the Essence of Things: Leo Cremonese’s Perceptions

Andrew Frost

Catalogue Essay to the exhibition “Perception (Colour, Air)”, Birds Hut Projects, Kelgoola, September 2018.

Image: “Orange”, 2018, Site specific installation.

The Birds Hut site is just on the other side of a cow grate and fence. On one side of the line is intensely farmed grazing land, the ruined trunks of dead trees and house-sized boulders lining both sides of the narrowing valley. On the other side is the dirt road that takes you, eventually, to the lush waters of Dunns Swamp Ganguddy. That side of the fence is green and alive. The sound of sheep and lambs drifts up the valley, birdcalls echo through the trees. This division between two lands, and all the juxtapositions it creates, is a perfect location for Leo Cremonese’s latest exhibition Perception (Colour, Air).

The concepts of place and presence are vital to Cremonese’s work. In some instances the viewer is asked to stand in a particular position and to look in a certain direction to begin a contemplation of a discrete intervention into the landscape. In other works, the viewer must sit in a box and view a painted surface or, in another, swing on a seat in front of a roughly painted hessian fabric. In yet other works one must enter the room of a cabin to view two small works, or climb to a particular position on a hill, or to lie under a tree, or simply contemplate a canvas attached to the weathered wooden structure of a dilapidated caravan.  Just as the Zen-inspired music theorist Leonard Meyer spoke of the effects of listening to music, Cremonese’s work “posits a semiconscious level of emotional affect” caused by responses to the sensations of movement, colour and form.

Interestingly, this sense of presence in Cremonese’s pieces is not so much a direction to look at a specific thing – although that does happen – but rather it’s also that a profound effect is created by something not immediately obvious. In the trees, a little distance away from the hut, is Rock (Blue) [2018]. The effect of the curtaining of the native forest and scrub is dramatic, and the purple-blue of the curtain is startling, but it’s also the effect that the colour has on one’s appreciation of the green leaves and brown trunks of trees that enhances and extends the effect. Into secondary and tertiary colours. Likewise, Orange [2018] – an orange spot on the green timbered caravan - creates a shimmering blue-green effect in the distant sky, an effect so subtle it’s easy to miss.  Inside the hut, in what’s left of the bedroom, are two small works on the walls – Map (Capertee Valley and Dunsville Loop with Combimelon and Cadegong Valley) [2018], and From Combimelon Looking Toward Capertee Valley with Mt. Marsden Obscuring Dunsville Loop [2018]. Their descriptive titles offer detailed explanations of what we are looking at, yet their placement is ambiguous – are they a part of the hut? Or interventions? – and how do we reconcile the two views of the same thing?   

Cremonese’s installations playfully highlight the textured surfaces of various fabrics and the threads and cords of their sewn edges and joins, with the rough and smooth applications of pigment on a variety of surfaces. Their deliberate deployment, as in the self-explanatory Swing [2018] and in the box work Yellow [2018] force their surfaces at the viewer quite forcefully – as one is required to crawl on hands and knees on rough wood into the box, or risk launching one’s self at the hessian fabric facing the swing.

The concept of wabi-sabi is acutely felt through the works, where the perfection of natural form is juxtaposed with the weathered and decaying junk of wood and rusting steel scattered around the Birds Hut site. The deliberate placement of these things into the timeworn corners of the site proposes a Zen sense of transience, an elevated sense of the here and now, and an acute acknowledgement that all this too will disappear.

It’s this contemplation of form, surface and the attendant effects of colour that infuses Cremonese’s subtle and minimal interventions with the spirit of Zen. As Zen poet and theorist Fredric Lieberman remarked, “The job of the artist is to suggest the essence, the eternal qualities of the object, which in itself is a work of natural art before the artist arrives on the scene …” In other words, what Cremonese demonstrates in this body of work, is an unimagined poetry that lies just at the edges of our consciousness, and that by setting up these temporary works he prompts us to “think beyond reality into the essence of reality.”  

Dr. Andrew Frost is an independent researcher in science fiction, cinema and contemporary art, and the art critic for Guardian Australia.  He is the writer and presenter of more than dozen documentaries on Australian contemporary art for ABC1 and is the director of My Space Program: The Art of Peter Hennessey [2016] and The Grand Mistake: A Portrait of Mclean Edwards [2017].

The Colour for the Air

The Colour for the Air

Alex Wisser

Catalogue Essay to the exhibition “Perception (Colour, Air)”, Birds Hut Projects, Kelgoola, September 2018.

Image: “Inverted Perception” 2018, site specific participatory installation.

Bird’s Hut is, to say the least, a mixed environment.  The land itself is a scrappy bit of bush with steep cliffs rising up on two sides that wrap around a small clearing through which a deeply sunken creek bed flows.  A 19th Century shepherd’s hut is its chief architectural feature, and though predominantly intact, it has clearly suffered from decades of abuse and neglect that mix its rustic ruin with jarring modern accents of graffiti and repair.  The clearing is littered with several old cars and odd flimsy structures showing signs of weather and gravity.  Despite the ‘mixed environment’, Bird’s Hut has a kempt appearance.  Nevertheless, every broken artefact that sits within its frame argues with the natural environment, and the conflict disrupts the peaceful unity that the visitor is tempted to compose out of its idyllic context.

It is a challenging setting for an art exhibition, to say the least, as any object placed within its field of vision is necessarily drawn into and absorbed by the shear complexity of detail, from the speculation of sunlight in the leaves of every tree to flakes of paint and the objects of rust and the warping water-stained wood of a collapsing caravan.  There is a reason that art appears most regularly between white walls where, detached from the messiness of the world, it can assume its heightened object status as the thing itself: the art object.  At birds hut, the art object struggles to maintain its special status. The world in its plenum threatens to demote it into just another thing, another bit of junk littering this remnant of nature.

The temptation, I suppose, would be to compete: to create work that would somehow overwhelm the visual ‘noise’ of the environment with the magnitude of its presence, to create an object that would somehow maintain its self-sufficiency despite the world crowding around it with the cacophonous demands of its infinite field of relationship.  Leo Cremonese takes a more subtle approach, and one, I would argue, that is more satisfying than any such conquest.  He abandons the object for the air. 

Perhaps I overstate, for he does not quite abandon the object.  There are objects in this exhibition, you will be relieved to learn, art objects, but they all discard self-sufficiency for their relation to the world around them.  This is established emphatically in a work that initiates the exhibition. “Yellow” is encountered as one enters Bird’s Hut itself, a large, finely crafted plywood cube occupies a small alcove to the right, one leg of the L shaped room.  A banner-like painting covers an entire wall of the alcove.  Between the painting and the box is enough room for an audience member to squeeze into an opening that allows access to the blackened interiority of the cube.  It is awkward, and slightly undignified, but after settling oneself inside, your attention inevitably turns to the opening through which you have just clambered.  Through its absolute frame, the world outside glows in a shear plane of yellow, your vision constrained to this rectangular perspective onto the yellow colour field that dominates the bottom 2/3rds of the draped painting.  It is serene and beautiful, and you might be drawn to linger within it. Do so, and you will begin to notice that what you are looking at is not the luminous surface of the painting, but the luminous atmosphere between the box in which you sit and the colour field at which you gaze. 

In a sense, this first work enacts the title of the exhibition and orients the viewer to what will come.

There is another work in the same room, but in order to describe it we must begin again from outside the hut and approach it across a large blue carpet spread over the open ground.  The carpet is old and looks as though it has lain on the ground for years, worn by the elements until it almost belongs to the earth around it. Inside the hut another two carpets of a similar condition cover the floor and upon one of them stands another contraption. This time it is a swing. Looking a little bit like a guillotine, it faces another banner painting, umber red draped from the ceiling of the hut.  Approaching across the carpets, I was struck by the relationship communicated between these rectangles of colour and the painting draped on the far wall.  I wondered if this was an intentional effect, carefully aligned by the artist to emphasise the family resemblance between the carpets and painting.  Were these carpets art or artefacts?  Whatever mental interrogation I made, the result was always an amplification of the ambiguity I was attempting to dispel.  In the end I had to resign myself to the awareness that these objects held their relationship to the artwork, and that I could not exclude them from my experience of it.  If these old carpets pulled the artwork into the world, the painting pulled the carpets into its own sphere as art.  Any further attempt to isolate the one from the other was absurd, and so I submitted myself to the guillo... swing. 

I sat in its cradle and began to rock myself towards the painting, until I had a civilised swing going. I dutifully attempted to absorb myself in the surface of the painting, attempting to measure the experience through the novelty of having my body in motion, my point of perspective in constant vacillation.  I must admit that I was not very successful.  It was difficult to concentrate on  the picture plane as my body swung through space, the knuckles of my fingers threatened with  scraping by the supports from which I was suspended as the weight of my middle aged body strained to collapse the whole machine in its compulsion to return to earth.  Even beyond the sense of embodied alarm, the contraption disrupts the stasis with which the viewer customarily absorbs themselves in the surface of the painting.  The whole work is designed to deny to the viewer those conventional conditions in which abstraction occurs, in which we forget both our body and the world, and loose ourselves to the picture plane, becoming the viewer.  If Cremonese refuses the art object its abstraction from the world around it, insisting as he does that it has no existence unto itself, he also refuses his audience that same abstraction from the world in which we traditionally loose our bodies in the contemplation of idealised or idealising objects. 

In fact if there is a single consistent object that unifies this exhibition, I would say it was the human body.  Across the breadth of the exhibition, my body was the one thing I was made constantly aware of, as the works required that I scramble up a treacherous hillside, teeter on an uncertain tree stump or lay down in the undercarriage of a tree.  There is a sense that Leo is continuing, counterintuitively, the thread of minimalism, which also emphasised the embodied experience of the artwork.  Minimalism emphasised the relationship of the art object to the viewer by acknowledging the embodied viewer as contributing to the experience of the work.  They did this though by reducing the relations internal to the object to compose a gestalt or in Judd’s term “Specific Objects” and often using large scale to produce a sense of ‘whole’ objects.  Cremonese inverts this relationship by creating works that physically impose a self awareness on the body of the viewer and at the same time reduce the specific object status of the artwork that opens it to the entire relational field of the world around it.

In the end, the blurring of the lines between the world, the artwork and the viewer draw one to a singular conclusion, if you can even call it that.  As with the carpets, your attention is drawn constantly away from those things you know to be art works towards objects who’s status is more ambivalent, a pile of stones, an ‘arrangement’ of twigs, even the seemingly ordered way that fallen branches are distributed through the undercarriage of the trees.  The eye wanders to the horizons, until you see mountains and the trees and the stones, you notice the composition of the objects littering the site of Birds Hut and it is at this point that you might understand the artist’s intention.  His objects, instead of drawing you into themselves as inherent sites of meaning, constantly refer you outward, indicating the world around them.  Perhaps you might see this world as I did, with the idea that you are the artist, absorbed in the act of perceiving the world, of observing the molten relation of parts, the intangibility of light and colour, your attention constantly drawn between the swarm of detail and the stabilising vision of the whole.  Is this not what art is meant to do: to produce an awareness of the world that exceeds our awareness of those things which refer to that world? 

Alex Wisser.

Alex Wisser is a freelance writer and curator. He is a co-founder of Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival in Kandos.

He is also a photographer and practicing artist working in performance and new media.

uspendisse a efficitur libero.