Metro Gallery, Melbourne, presents the second solo show of Paris based artist Anthony White. This new body of work draws upon the intersection of technology and the world of science fiction literature.
The title of the exhibition is derived from a variation of the title of the dystopian science fiction novel by H.G Wells 'The Sleeper Awakes', written in 1910.
Drawing parallels with themes of revolt and social unrest from the Wellsian novel and by juxtaposing these with today’s sense of interconnectedness and social mobility. The artist creates inspiration for the new exhibition, drawing upon themes in relation to the role of technology in current political events especially during the Arab Spring uprising of 2010.
Apart from the ongoing interest with literature the new body of work also makes reference to the gestural mark in the graffiti movement as an original form of dissent and an early form of collective violence. Through preliminary paper collages created from salvaged Paris subway advertisements.
These 13 new paintings show a preoccupation with the intersection of the gestural mark, bodily performance and corporeality drawing from the avant garde Japanese painting movement, Gutai of the 1950s. These new paintings further explore ideas of spontaneity, performance and the overlap between performative actions and gestural painting in order to gain transformative power or transcendence.

Anthony White -

This series is titled after the Italian term Pentimento. This phrase, which is used to describe layerings, additions or changes to a work of art, allows multitudinous readings, different layers as one descends through White’s palimpsest of forms and colours. However pentimento can also be translated as repentance, which suggests atonement or remorse. In 2009, White immigrated to France after being awarded a studio at La Cite Internationale Des Arts. Is Pentimento, then, a form of atonement for having left his native country, a gift from afar to compensate for his departure from Australia?

Rather than Australian indigenous art, White is more accustomed to comparisons with the abstractionists of the New York School of the 1950s, Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauchenberg’s Combines. The artist himself suggests the French affichistes artist Jacques Villegle who created magical collages via torn metro and street posters, creating poetical compositions that embraced elements of the alphabet, photography and design. It is not difficult to see Villegle’s influence on White.

Although distinctly painterly, one can see the suggestions of torn edges, of strange depths as though other narratives reside beneath the immediate surface. Like the hidden Egyptian hieroglyphs obscured by palimpsests of ‘new’ information, White creates a world of textures, his own secret histories which allow hours of contemplation, translation and interpretation.

Words by Ashley Crawford, Melbourne 2015

Anthony White -