Anthony White

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Pentimento

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It seems apt that Anthony Whites potent new body of works were executed in Paris. The City of Light is, after all, home to a culture fascinated with diverse forms of human expression. This is evidenced from Picassos early love affair with African sculpture through to the more recent establishment of The Muse du quai Branly with its cornucopia of indigenous imagery.

The Muse du quai Branly is particularly noteworthy for its goldmine of Australian Indigenous art. Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri amongst others grace its walls. This is worth mentioning because White, although by now clearly recognised as an international artist and based in France, was born in Australia, and contemplating these works, with their chalky whites and intense ochres, it is not hard to recall the tribal markings of the Pitjantjara or the Yirridjdja. And although he is known as an abstractionist, it is also not hard to re-read these works as landscape the deep, gloomy eucalypt forests that dominate parts of Arnhem Land.

White may be uncomfortable with this perhaps fanciful reading. But this series is, after all, titled after the Italian term Pentimento. This phrase, which is used to describe layerings, additions or changes to a work of art, allows multitudinous readings, different layers as one descends through Whites palimpsest of forms and colours. However pentimento can also be translated as repentance, which suggests atonement or remorse. In 2009, White immigrated to France after being awarded a studio at La Cite Internationale Des Arts. Is Pentimento, then, a form of atonement for having left his native country, a gift from afar to compensate for his departure from Australia?

Rather than Australian indigenous art, White is more accustomed to comparisons with the abstractionists of the New York School of the 1950s, Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauchenbergs Combines. The artist himself suggests the French affichistes artist Jacques Villegle who, alongside fellow artist Raymond Hains, created magical collages via torn metro and street posters, creating poetical compositions that embraced elements of the alphabet, photography and design. It is not difficult to see Villegles influence on White. Although distinctly painterly, one can see the suggestions of torn edges, of strange depths as though other narratives reside beneath the immediate surface. Like the hidden Egyptian hieroglyphs obscured by palimpsests of new information, White creates a world of textures, his own secret histories which allow hours of contemplation, translation and interpretation.

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Cover Image: Flight, oil on linen, 121 x 106 cm

Design: T-world

Printed in Melbourne,Australia (2015)

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Anthony White (Artwork) Metro Gallery

978-1-921618-38-3

Secret HistoriesWords by Ashley Crawford

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