A giant transparent inflatable, long lengths of darkened handwritten walls, a silicon Chapel, light-lines and tapestry of light, a fountain-font and a hanging cube of 40 glassine drawings make up this new installation.
This is an installation where early Catacomb art an its connection to the roots of early Christian art, along with a most important analysis of it by the art historian Max Dvorak has been a major stimulus and influence. In the first and second century catacombs, a new art and a re evaluation of expression occurred. The minimalist,
reductionist aesthetic which Western Art now values so highly, began, to my mind, in the dank, dark passages of the underground funeral chambers of the early Christians. These caverns explode with contemporaneity; white walls, geometric and architectonic red and green linear structures with free-floating paired back images of representational figures.
“The wholly earth-bound problems of antiquity ceased to occupy men’s minds and their place was taken with eschatological considerations. With this change of heart came new ideas and re-evaluations of man’s emotional life — all radically different from the naturalistic ideals of antiquity which had striven so hard to embody the forces of nature. Now the whole purpose of painting had changed. In the catacombs it was not used to portray forms of physical perfection, men of heroic stature, or memorable historic deeds, rather to lead man to prayer and an awareness of heavenly things… These figures had already been reduced to their essential material elements, were now transposed, beyond the limitations of earthly things, into a sphere of free, unlimited and timeless spaciousness. Space was thus transformed from a physical phenomenon into a metaphysical concept and therefore, at the same time, from an interpretive to a constitutive element of pictorial invention.The visionary representations of the catacombs are not presented within the confines of a terrestrial setting, but in ideal space where everything that is tangible, measurable or subject to mechanical
correlation has lost both powers and significance.”
So the context for this installation is the cavernous unused area of Shed E, a place connected to the river and separated from the major flows of the Brisbane population, just as the Roman catacombs were separated from the city and below the general hustle and bustle of life.
The book of ‘The Apocalypse’, or ‘Revelation’ describes the end of the world and events leading and culminating in the passing of earth’s time into eternity. It is a highly visual and graphic book focussed on and investigated by theorists and artists for millennia in many media, be it the catacombs of the first and second century, the windows and tapestries of the thirteenth century, the frescoes and paintings of the fifteenth century, or the movies and computer games of the 21st century. This exhibition explores the meanings which the apocalypse has for us today, and draws together or conjoins seven historical and contemporary perceptions (theories and methods) of the Apocalypse and and its representations.
Dr. Irene Barberis
There is a small catalogue which accompanies the works in Apocalypse: Seven Histories into Futures.
