'The Painted Image: Twenty Contemporary Western Australian Painters'

As we look back on the twentieth century the history of its architecture can be seen as articulating the changing aspirations and inevitable failure of utopian modernism. Today we look, with the confidence of hindsight, on the early modernist dreams of the International School as naive and hopelessly out of touch with the real lives of those who were supposed to inhabit its buildings. Patrizia Tonello's paintings amount to a severe appraisal of the symbolic purpose of architecture. Instead of the heroic rhetoric of modernism Patrizia uses architecture to signify an apocalyptic future where buildings take on a sinister and threatening set of meanings.

In Ad Infinitum (1990) she describes a landscape not just dominated by architecture but seemingly defined by its presence. The endless line of smoke stacks parodies the utopian town plans of modernism epitomised by Le Corbusier's dreams and manifest in the failure of Brasilia. The landscape lies faceless and afflicted, subservient to the power of an ordered culture. This fundamental opposition of nature and culture has been a persistent theme in her work. Most of her images construct a dark and gloomy condition in which there never appears a human presence beyond the buildings that mark absence and alienation. Like the paintings of de Chirico and Sironi the built environment in its emptiness stands as a metaphor for absence of humanism.

Many of Patrizia Tonello's paintings are painted on disused blinds. These form a metaphoric reference to the failure of the Enlightenment's notion of ordering the world through progressive and linear thinking. She ridicules the idea of a painting as a window on the world and its incumbent reliance on the laws of perspective to create a likeness. The failure of this system is shown in her paintings as a landscape unfit to inhabit and devoid of life.

In Land of Nod (1990) a city that looks suspiciously like Perth has been inundated by rising waters. The reference here is to the Greenhouse Effect and the real possibility that we face a future of environmental disaster as a result of our insatiable appetite for progress. The ruin in the middle ground of the painting is the wrecked dream of the past in which industrialisation and material wealth were going to deliver us into a new world. Her world of the future is different, but it does not look anything like the dreams of decades past.

Collectively the paintings form a strong critique of all that was thought good and heroic at the beginning of the century. It would be too easy to dismiss them as millenarian gloom but one has to only look to the incredible events of the recent war (First Gulf War) in the Middle East to realise that our natural environment is so vulnerable and possibly no longer able to defend itself. This is the power of Patrizia Tonello's work for it brings into play all the debates and concerns of contemporary discourse on our relationship with the environment and the suspicions that cloud the future.

Julian Goddard, 1991
Excerpts from 'The Painted Image: Twenty Contemporary Western Australian Painters'
Western Australian Art # 1, Ed. Ted Snell, Visual Culture Research Unit, Curtin University of Technology
1991

© 2007 - 2009 Patrizia Tonello
Website by Graham Taylor