Guy Brown and Grace Burzese
The artist’s studio, commonly a site for romantic ideas regarding art practise and enigmatic personalities. For most, it is a physical and psychological necessity that can be both private refuge and torment. The agony of the first mark, the doubt around new directions: the cliched standoff between the artist and blank canvas comes to mind. What are the possibilities when you share that intimate space?
Parallel Playground is an exhibition that evolved from the visual dialogue created in a shared studio space between artists Guy Brown and Grace Burzese. Guy and Grace had been friends for 20 years before becoming partners a few years ago. The exhibition title refers to parallel play, a stage of early childhood development where young children play beside each other; while interested in the other, they don’t try to interact or influence one another. Parallel play is primarily an unspoken absorption of what the other is doing.
Chiefly apparent is the artists’ ongoing love of paint itself. Their deep relationship to the materiality and process of painting, is reflected in the vitality and emotional presence of the works. The collective foundation of their work is a desire to explore the expressive and sensual potential of paint, largely through colour and abstraction.
In her new works for Parallel Playground, Grace paints directly onto aluminum and introduces compact sculptures constructed during a period of experimentation in the studio. These works consider shape, departing from her previous exhibitions that examined broad open gestures. Through methods of reveal/conceal, Grace exposes the aluminium, quietly disclosing its reflective qualities.
For Guy, setting up a scrunched piece of paper or aluminium as a still life, is an avenue to explore his impression of the materials. Through a process of painterly reduction he captures the interplay between stillness and movement. Abstraction and figuration. Ever curious, his mark making divulges an open-ended and restless inquiry into what he calls the ‘primary essence of painting’.
Parallel Playground invokes a nostalgic reverence for the solitiude and joy of hands-on studio time. As an exhibition it represents a snap-shot of shared studio play, the unconscious realisation of idiosyncratic creative concerns. The artists add, ‘We back each other, in that what is primary for us is being true to ourselves as artists and following a thread, and sometimes that means working quietly and nutting it out – not worrying about the world outside’.
Ali Noble 2016