Deutscher and Hackett

Epic in both scale and intent, Dale Frank's sumptuously coloured, glossy canvases such as the present offer a continually evolving dialogue upon the subversion of twentieth-century art history, the pretensions of the contemporary art world and the problems inherent in the very act of painting itself.

Typically featuring glistening, marbled flows and ponderous slides, slow-creeping bleeds and animated squiggles, these huge plasma-like abstractions possess a remarkable ability to completely absorb the viewer's consciousness and thus provoke powerful emotional responses akin to the medium of film. Yet despite their inordinately place-specific titles and the swirling tides of tinted varnish which seem to convey the forces of nature in a manner reminiscent of Romantic landscape painting, Frank deliberately eschews any reference to the literal -  his 'landscapes' are neither real nor imagined vistas. As he elaborated at the time of the present work's exhibition at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in 2003, 'If people broadened their perceptions of what landscape is, and the history of Australian landscape painting, they would be able to embrace what is, on the surface, non-representational art as landscape instantaneously. To the average person, landscape is non-representational, it is an abstract concept.'¹

Equally deceptive is Frank's painting technique - the application of strident, pulsating colour in its molten liquid form ('a living entity') - which ostensibly appears random or unpredictable. Such spontaneity, however, belies the artist's absolute control over both the medium and the environment in which the work is created. Poured onto the horizontal canvas surface, luminous pools of pigmented varnish immediately begin to resist and coalesce; as further layers are added, the angle and direction of the varnish flows are determined by the manipulation of wedges and blocks placed beneath the painting. As Frank reveals, 'It is a totally hands on and cerebral way of painting - much more intense than a half-centimetre brush and tubes of oil paint. The process can take up to twenty-four hours where I have to be permanently standing over the painting, constantly considering every minute aspect.'²

With his visionary eloquence and technical ingenuity, Dale Frank occupies an esteemed position at the forefront of Australian contemporary art practice. Awarded the prestigious Red Cross Art Award by John Olsen at the tender age of 16, his was a precocious talent and within only five years, he had achieved international recognition with solo exhibitions across Australia, Europe and America. Significantly, in 1983, his work was selected for show alongside Thomas Lawson and Anselm Kiefer at the Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa, Italy, and in 1984, he was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale. In 2000, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney held a survey exhibition of his work titled Ecstasy: 20 years of painting, and in 2005, Frank won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria. Today, his paintings are held in every major public collection across Australia, as well as numerous private and corporate collections around the world.

1. Frank cited in Crawford, A., 'No wide brown land for me', The Age, 13 August 2003
2. Frank cited in Crawford, A., 'Dale Frank', Art & Australia, 42 (2) Sydney, 2004, p. 214

VERONICA ANGELATOS