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].