John Cullinane has always been a popular, if not an affluent painter. I recall the remarkable reception for his first show at Artplace, a gushing gossipy enthusiasm as unique as it was disturbing. His appearance was taken for granted, as if his work was only to be expected as it fitted a required pattern of good taste, offered a figurative frisson guaranteed not to frighten the horses. His dedication to the elaboration of a complex and subtle technique for his soft centred figurative fantasies, - Moreau out of Gericault via Delvaux suggested he could be a likely candidate to succeed Juniper, Haynes et al as the darling of Perth art collectors and corporate curators.

Cullinane is as popular as ever, he is even selling well. up to a point. He has yet, however, to find his place in the WA pantheon of the complacent and superannuated. He never will. He is far too good an artist to settle for that kind of nonsense. Outside his art he lacks social ambition. He is not lazy. There is an alien kernel to his imagery, a disturbing dissonance that never quite lets viewers go their own way. This contradiction, an atmospheric, sensual irritation, appears less a property of his images, at times can they be quite trite, as of his technique, which is far from the neutral, professional elaboration of glazes, scumbles and soft edged semi-liquid marks that it pretends to be.

Since the sixties WA charm school painters have relied primarily on two devices to authenticate their work - hard edges and large scale, crisp, usually unglazed, explosions of white based impasto, constructed in a high key tonal scale. This reassuring salon formula turns up in strange places. Jon Tarry, the current wanna-be heir apparent to Juniper, offered up a particularly soulless and banal version of it plastered all over his recent wooden wall pieces.

Cullinane by contrast uses fluid paint floating in a medium that spreads thinly between strokes and seeps over every edge. Everything in the picture plane appears as if behind a veil. It cannot be touched. Cullinane relies on the arbitrary geometry of his compositions and the occasional light/dark or chromatic contrast in the more open landscapes to establish volume, space and what there is of light in his canvases. More importantly his technique requires that he retain the evidence of his struggle, perhaps even the pain, of evoking any image.

This procedure offers no easy reassurance. Indeed, the recurrence of a paradoxical crisis of the senses, especially sight and touch, within Cullinane’s imagery and subject matter, works with his technique against their tendency to become mere banal mis en scènes. Cullinane’s method, then, undermines the easy seduction of popular provincial figuration. In particular its difficulties open up private spaces in WA’s pitifully ill informed public consensus about good painting as always figurative, soft focussed and sexy.

Despite the efforts of Goddard de Fiddes and AGWA to invent a local minimalism the dominant mode of appreciation for collectors and gallery goers remains keyed to a particular understanding of WA figurative painting, local art for local people, painting with a pre-scripted alibi, words that can be collectively intoned like a charm to guarantee its value, something we can agree on, a safe bet. Our local minimalists may turn out to be practising regional figuration by other means.

Cullinane undermines any guarantee of provincial self satisfaction by collapsing this figurative/abstract opposition from both ends, by shifting the registration of his technique against the image, so that one can no longer look through and into a figurative composition to the rewarding abstract gestures from which it is made. One’s first experience of a Cullinane is always of a dry, unyielding impoverishment, of a lucid, glacial image, whose very being resists all penetration.

I suspect this powerfully disruptive moment remains unarticulated for most viewers, a mere irritation, a scratchy patch between the conscious and unconscious, best left unexplored. Certainly the most confronting works in Cullinane’s current show remain unsold. Those that could be seen, superficially, as simply lyrical, assonant rather than dissonant, with our provincial sensibility did very well. Their resistance and resilience could be put down to nothing more than quirks of style

In his Self Portrait, Cullinane reveals style is the last thing that concerns him in painting. His face is pushed up towards the edge of a stretched canvas crammed down to the lower left corner of the painting. The loose edge of the canvas peeling back from the shadow in the corner relates closely to it as if we are waiting for the edges of the face itself to peel away to show darkness within. A tent of yellow light, from a shaded bulb, defines the volume of the studio for most of the canvas. Under it, objects shrink in scale so that they seem far away from each other. A tiny easel bears a tinier canvas with a face-like blotch on it, light years away from the artist’s face. An ever increasing distance between things, invoked by the difficulties of painting and its effects on the artist’s identity, is the chief theme of this work.

The self portrait could be an allegory of the demands of painterly vision, but space is also social, so one could be justified in suggesting that the artist is clinging to the canvas, as to a life raft, the only solid in the vortex of his sight. It is as if the seamless substance of the world were beyond his vision, only to be recaptured in the texture of his technique. This hypertrophic form of looking, isolating every object diagramatically as if under a microscope is often associated with the sensory economy of erotic arousal or, at the very least of neurosis, of a displaced, isolated and episodic voyeurism.

This kind of visual disengagement also echoes the experience of displacement disjunction and discontinuity between artist and the nominal subject, typical of a provincial culture. It is a question of split significance, does the painting address lotus eating local taste and its degraded sycophantic version of the figurative or does it engage the European tradition with all its doubts and difficulties. Perhaps the amputation or suspension of painterly syntax is a means to register this crisis in the studio while postponing its consequences elsewhere.

Several paintings echo and amplify these relationships. Cullinane occasionally refers directly to classical tales and, unavoidably, to their place in the European tradition. Titian, Bernini and many others were fascinated by Diana and Acteon the tale of the angry goddess who turns a voyeur into a stag and hunts him to death with her hounds. Cullinane’s version of this tale of the wages of undisciplined voyeurism denies or ignores Diana’s fearful power. It too is riven with divided desire His goddess poses bare breasted, doll-like uncertain. Actaeon’s rigid profile, frontal gaze, stiff arm and prehensile hand all recoil from voyeuristic engagement.

This unusual conception revolves around Cullinane’s tragic conception of sight and its relation to the other senses. He uses it as a matrix from which to generate his compositions. These in their turn reveal the existential hopelessness and the erotic catastrophes of the dislocated visual. The setting of Listening for the Women, (another classical reference) could be a road or back alley between high rises in Perth, criss crossed with deep shadow. Each band of shadow contains a man clinging to the wall, ear pressed to stone, waiting for a sound. The composition is determined by their blindness, by the painter’s struggle with the detached dysfunctionality of provincial vision. Cullinane rarely offers or refers to any texture or detail in his painted environment. In Listening for the Women, the shadows alone contain rich variations in marks and texture, beyond them only planes of absence articulate the scene.

Listening for the Women recalls movies in which the visual order of urban space is disrupted directly by frustrated desire, as a token of which figures lurch along the streets “out of control”. This is a major motive from Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou to every second sci fi movie. Cullinane’s use of this motif highlights his commitment to the mainstream modernity that always recognised the paradox of desire as that which empties out the promise of modernity (another experience more keenly felt in the provinces). He draws on a wide range of modernist references. Stepping Out, which echoes the images of Dresden prostitutes painted by E L Kirchener in the First World War. Cullinane recently spent time in Germany - working in the Gaswerk studio and gallery at Schwabach. His more demanding paintings continually echo Leger, Magritte, Ernst, and Balthus, artists obsessed with the relationship of the erotic and iconic qualities of body and figure to the dream screen of modernity.

In Sirens, he constructs two box-like structures, containing isolation cells for male and female figures, from planes of absence similar to those in Listening for the Women. This absence always acts as a screen for fantasy. Winged female figures like Goya’s version of the Furies, scavenge between the boxes. Single figures in the empty cells, five men and one woman assume various postures of despair and desire. This is an inner city Inferno. The boxes would be at home in Dante’s circle of ice. Indeed, Cullinane’s figures have something of the quality of saints and sinners in mediaeval altarpieces. Siren voices lured them all to a hell without revelation, in which nothing meets the gaze but blank walls and windows. All vision is blocked or cancelled. Only the woman has a mirror, which transfixes her with its gaze. In doing so it invokes the catastrophe of sight in the absence of vision as the tragic motif of this painting and much of Cullinane’s work.

In Rancid Man, a huge male figure trundles a tumbril of small women through another dream screen city scape. They could be dolls or furies invoked by his failed vision. Either way the man smells of his relationship with them, a cold crust of dry sweat perhaps, residue of unacted desire. Another small woman, standing on a table playing the violin steals the show in Wasteland II one of the most compelling piece in the show. The tables has a crisp white cloth. A besuited giant gazes stiffly across it holding two femalepuppet heads across his chest

Cullinane clearly occupies a paradoxical position in the Perth art scene. His painterly ambition is far too demanding, too complex for his apparent audience, yet his popularity grows consistently. It could be simple familiarity or straight forward admiration for his technique but this is unlikely. His work was popular from his first show. More probably his emphasis on the paradoxes of vision and desire parallels aspects of the provincial situation closely enough for his viewers to recognise the relationship, but not closely enough to require a rigorous response to his concerns. Moreover, Cullinane’s central theme, the endlessly repeated moment of blindness where desire overpowers but is negated by vision is the pre-eminent provincial theme

Cullinane’s impressive technique holds it all together for everyone. Nonetheless, it is only a matter of time before the tension between his wider ambition and the comfortable charades of his audience come into conflict. Sooner or later, probably sooner Cullinane will look for greater frankness in his technique, more grit and muscle in the imagery. The veil must be torn, the glacier shattered. If he survives he will be the first succesful Perth painter not to abandon his wider ambitions.

© David Bromfield 2001