We all leak a little, but, just like Pauline Hanson, we don’t like it, not one bit. Most of us will go to endless trouble to maintain a clean dry silhouette, to hold our body intact, in a timeless moment. Age is irrelevant, whether old or young the goal is to maintain a healthy integrity at all times. The image of a cheerful granny in an advert for brown bread is as much about being leak proof as the big breasts of the bimbo on the car bonnet that will never lactate. 

To leak, to sweat, piss, defecate, vomit, bleed or blow snot around the room confesses mortality. To leak in public is to stand out from the rest. To leak uncontrollably is to become a walking death’s head, someone whose corpse is already possessed by the earth. Ebola kills by allowing every cell to leak its contents into an odious toxic mush, a total loss of the order that is life

Thus small anxieties – stains on underwear, flies, sweaty armpits, all take their immense metaphoric power from fear of the ultimate consequence of leakage. Smells too are tokens of leakage, farts, sweat, piss all affect our social presence. Macbeth had it right. Not all the perfumes of Arabia can sweeten the scents of death which are with us always.

Leaks bleeds and stains have long been central to the art of painting, printmaking and other image making processes. The Surrealists and their heirs the New York school painters were painfully sensitive to bodily stains and leakage as the transcendant metaphors in painting. Arshile Gorky’s abstract sadism is built from stains that leak round incomplete silhouettes in razor sharp lines, a neurotic parody of traditional elements of drawing. Rothko made an entire career out of the tragic potential of stained canvases, which may represent, not so much the abstract body, as its archaic remnants, the stains left on the earth after leakage and putrefaction are long gone and even bones have turned to dust. One might make a painting by leaving a body on canvas to rot for a thousand years.

To paint stained underwear, sweaty armpits and nightmare desires as Indra Geidans has done in her new work at Artplace is not simply to transgress social conventions, to represent that which is always unthought, but to play out a deeply convicted relationship to the very act of painting as a doodle in a charnel house. For all her cool, her dry as dust rectitude, Geidans has always seemed to be a painter in crisis, a reluctant ocular mortician, to whom depiction and embalming appear almost identical. In her every dry mark she has a unique, often spectacular, capacity for unblinking revelation of mortality. In this context the new  work appears a natural move, a logical extension.

One painting of flabby aging thighs and loose white undies, worn grey by washing, shocks not so much because of its sense of indecent voyeurism, the insistent presence of toneless flesh, but through its resonance with the tired cloth, the radical denial of sensuality in the flesh and under our gaze. There are so many stories of flesh putrefied by desire –  witches- old hags appear as beautiful maidens to make love, the handsome Dracula turned to a rotting corpse in sunlight, Dorian Grey saved by a portrait turned putrid. Intuitively we sense death in every gallery, behind every painting. Geidans brings it to the front in a whole row of small studies of stained underclothes the penis tucked away  to the side wrinkles  around the bum.

Clothes especially underwear can persist into immortality long after the flesh they clothed is dust. Geidans knows this only too well. She paints this terrifying truth as series  of perverse moments  from which the squeaky clean silhouette of the normal  is gone forever A balding man thrust his grubby torso into a dress. A woman  dons male dress back to front like straight jacket  and stares at red party frock in the corner .Clothes draped  over a chair seem to be plugged into the mains. At times Geidans can be as perverse  as Balthus – another painter  with the rare gift of dry and dessicated vision – lust turned to dust on the wing.