Melbourne artist David Freney-Mills explores the visual properties of text via improvised layers of painting with ink on Mulberry paper, choosing a single word for each painting and by process of fragmentation and repetition, he creates abstract arrangements that convey a sense of flux and transformation. Freney-Mills’ paintings act as organisms made up of accumulated layers and traces of decisions, the text overlapping in chance combinations weaving in and out of an atmospheric armature created by the artist painting on the back of the porous Mulberry paper and allowing the ink to permeate through to the facing side.
In Oracular Nebula 1 we see a dark diffusion of indigo blues, violets and greens reminiscent of cosmic gas clouds coloured by chemical reactions in deep space. Painted in light pastel colours the text eddies in and out of this nebulous environment, crystallising and dissolving. In this manner, Freney-Mills uses text to represent matter and it’s shifting nature as a vehicle for energy, coming into being and passing away. The text is also evocative of human consciousness in a state of constant reinvention wanting to project into the outside world and beyond while also focussed within it’s inner space, both outer and inner space have frontiers for awareness to push into, in both directions a void is contemplated, not a sterile void but one fertile with possibilities from which all forms, all ideas, and realizations come.
In order for consciousness to expand it must have a space in which to do so; these paintings in Oracular Nebula provide such a contemplative space.
Exhibiton Details:
Opening Friday, September 21st, 6-9pm
Exhibition runs September 19 – October 6
Five Walls (Gallery 1)
suite 3, level 1 / 119 Hopkins St Footscray
open wed-sat 12-5pm