Tonello brings out passion for time and space
Now the pre-Christmas season is under way, there are many more good exhibitions
to be seen. Patrizia Tonello's Doors Windows Walls at Artplace Claremont
offers an enthralling engagement with Mediterranean souvenirs.
All her images invoke the passage of time. Crumbling walls, endless quattrocento
verandas melting into the night and huge blocks of masonry overcome by
desert sand all exist in the space of memory, the landscape of past events
and present desires.
Take the large oil painting
Sanctum, which shows a crumbling wall complete
with hyper-illusionistic cracks and crumbling plaster. An arched window
has been punched into its centre, framed with fragile soft green fresco
that acts as a border between two realms of existence.
Through the window one can see further archways fitted around perspective
lines that converge at the centre of the image. One can follow the lines
of the floorboards into an infinite distance. This image would be equally
at home in a back street in Florence or in a Fremantle alley.
Finally, it is not a view of a real place but a record of the shifting
sands of memory and the patterns they leave behind. It is easily reconcilable
with Tonello's other, apparently unrelated, images which deal with Middle
Eastern architecture as metaphor.
Revenge For Purdah, for instance, adapts
the building styles favoured by the Crusaders into a little phallic prison
set in a bleak blue and ochre landscape.
Tonello paints mainly on old window blinds which have a particularly smooth
weave. They give her large works an appealingly dry surface in tune with
her architectural subject matter. This same use of impromptu material
also helps her to avoid becoming a mere faker of renaissance nostalgia,
a manufacturer of the kind of thing that can be bought from the tourist
shops of Florence and elsewhere. Tonello has a genuine passion for other
times and places.
For me, her most successful work was
Soliloquy, a perfect recovery of
one of those Proustian moments when one turns into a small empty courtyard
and one's life opens up against the background of ancient walls and timber.
Tonello very cleverly uses a night-time view of a 14th century arcade
to suggest the magic of this everyday epiphany.
David Bromfield
Excerpt from 'On Show', The West Australian, November 12, 1994, 'Big Weekend'
section, page 6
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