Words
Paintings by Julie Reeves are highly affective, at times unsettling. There is a quality that beckons as you pass by, a compelling power in their capture of your gaze, their theatricality and intensity.
In 2008, Perpetrate won the Peoples’ Choice Award at the Sunshine Coast Art Award. Dark Garden 4 won the same category at the Redland Art Awards in early 2009. The moment of suspension is present when you look into these oversized, moody images of beautiful young women with their strongly-coloured backgrounds and their indefinable position between decoration and minimalism.1 There is the invitation to glory, explore, luxuriate, drown in paint, while their titles have conceptual allusions, designed to take us further into an unmapped experience. It is not immediately apparent that the women are usually nude.
There is a filmic unreality in this invitation: the pulse quickens, the heart misses a beat, and a chemical response is awakened, akin to watching a romantic film which takes you deep inside the characters. There is trust involved in this journey, parallelling the filmic experience – a sense of darkness dwelling close by, possibly malign – unease akin to viewing Bill Henson’s images of teenagers. We want to watch, but who else is out there, watching us?
Interestingly, Reeves has, in the last fifteen years, developed two main bodies of work – the figurative, moodily realist imagery of young women - the other abstracted explorations of the wallpaper patterns of William Morris. The latter are silkily rendered, lush renditions of surface, with a similar ability to attract and ensnare the eye, running over a sensual exploration of pattern. Light and shade, shadow and light, intimacy and exposure are uncannily present in both groups of works. And the enigma of their titles such as Subsume, Confess, Demand extends across both modes of working.
At the heart of Reeves’s visual conundrum is exploration of a mood or concept beyond words. It is, instead, something felt, an indefinable restless desire felt in the nether regions of emotional engagement. We may sense the demands of the flesh, a desire to memorialize the headiness of romance, the need for a cerebral and emotional connection. And to be reminded of the compromise in every liaison.
In the entwined semi-circular forms enshrined in Perpetrate, 2002, there is an erotic sensibility all the more effective for its restraint. Demand is bright red, lit dangerously, with the pattern element growing inexorably larger, a visual shout. Yet Concede features a muted green organic pattern emerging with beauty and dignity from darkness, with a palpably quiet mood evoking disappointment, acceptance.
Reeves cites influences as diverse as Symbolist painting and literature and Lisa Yuskavage, the US-based painter whose explorations of the female body plunder the kitsch and crass to achieve a brightly lit and ambivalent emotional resonance. The Symbolists have intellectual appeal, subtlety and restraint, pent up feeling, also visible in the tempo of Reeves’s work. Yet it is their interest in testing the limits of mind and body, pushing the envelope intellectually, cerebrally, physically which has the strongest resonance.
The push/pull nature of these images also refers to the very real oppositional forces in their inspiration. Women are no longer the weaker sex in our society, visible in the power relations from the boardroom to the locker room. Increased power brings greater risk - is The blue-eyed girl (2005) prey or predator? Is she innocent or aggressor, consumed or consumer? Are the moodily lit surfaces of the wallpaper works such as Chemistry (2001) benign or malign?
The chemistry of love, discussed in the evolving field of brain science, may be compared to the effects of drugs like cocaine. “… the stages of romance reflect the changes in our brain during not only the ecstasies but also love’s throes… MRI scans of lovers looking at photos of their sweethearts show that a part of the brain with great concentrations of dopamine is activated; their brains look like those of people on cocaine.”2
Music, another forceful mood changer, is suggested in the titles of some of these works. They are enigmatic, romantic, evocative – some from contemporary song lyrics (Nick Cave’s or P.J. Harvey’s words parallelling the role of poetry in the imagery from the Symbolists). The past is invited into the present and given a contemporary edge. While innocence is suggested in these works, they are themselves devoid of innocence. Instead they are loaded with meaning, symbolizing contemporary angst and melding art, music and literature with personal tropes. Yet finally they are images of beauty robust with surface.
There is a compelling emotional dalliance in these images, which tightens with an aesthetic strength. Their web thickens, deepens, and holds the onlooker to seek sense in a narrative which eludes resolution.
There is an odyssey in each.
Louise Martin-Chew
1 Robyn Daw, in “Inclinatio sensualis”, catalogue essay for Inclination: paintings by Julie Reeves, Redland Art Gallery, 13 March – 13 April 2003.
2 Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself, Scribe Publications, 2007: p.115.
Above: Perpetrate series Oil on Board 2002 Brian Tucker Collection
Above L-R: Subsume Oil on Board 2000, Blue Eyed Girl Oil on Canvas 2005 and Concede Oil on Canvas 2000