Yes, a key can lie for ever in the place where the locksmith left it, and never be used to open the lock the master forged it for.   

– Ludwig Wittgenstein   

Eternity -  the infinite space

Essay by Nicholas Tsoutas (2023)

The critical power of Andrew Arnaoutopoulos’s abstract paintings lies precisely in the almost unconscious poetic minimalist aesthetic that he imposes on his canvas.  Blurring the distinctions between what constitutes a painting as a finished work of art and the bi-product and the detritus that the painting process produces, Arnaoutopoulos ironically challenges both the meaning and the history of painting with a type of un-painting that emphasises his meticulous concerns with the construction of the patterns and forms of painterly abstraction. His painting suggests a travelling through space, past the edge of the world, into a deep space, a space of constellations galaxies, black holes and burning stars, a space that has no edge.

In preparing to write this text I was transported back to an essay I wrote for Andrew in 1990 for his Monoliths – Industrial Surfaces on Large Canvas exhibition at Queensland Art Gallery, on the cover of which Andrew stands motionless almost mesmerised as if in prayer in front of his awkwardly shaped huge monolithic paintings of rusted surfaces in his studio. The centre spread image in that catalogue is of Andrew facing the camera but without the monoliths, only the over spray or splatter on the walls creating a negative space of the works.

What fascinated me with the conjunction of these two images was his awareness and fascination of what lay outside of the frames on the walls – the overspray of splatter. It was as if he somehow knew that the real challenge of his work was not necessarily resonant within the frame of the completed paintings but in the uncontrolled overspray beyond the edge of the work, beyond the frame as if what existed outside the frame was of equal or more importance than what was in the frame of the finished work.

This indeterminate bi-product, this splatter for him grew in significance as if he was aware of unintentional possibilities that existed beyond his desire and beyond the determination of the edge of the canvas. It was as if he knew already subconsciously of the disappearance of all things and of all matter and even the disappearance of the body itself and even eventually of the author him or herself into an eternity of infinite worlds.

It is here that I believe he has continued to sustain a focus on this un-painting process of either atomization or of imagining the expanding cosmos of the universe, and provides the substance and subject of his current exhibition, Eternity, as everything seems to be in a process of temporal dissolution.  

In a way he is concerned with what is forgotten by history, and what sits unintentionally outside of formal understandings of history as he explores and distills the intense experiences of painting that can only be produced uncannily outside of his direct control, as if by chance or accident. However in this context, Arnaoutopoulos seems to capture in his paintings that rare elusive beauty of a new language of painting that exists only when it exceeds itself. Eternity, the exhibition, is a weaving of ideas, paintings and sculptural installation that spans time itself, intersecting key moments, preoccupations and critical actions in his long career as an artist. Past, present and future for Andrew Arnaoutopoulos functions seemingly as a continuum, where everything is interconnected and interdependent converges in an infinite set of permutations that function as eternity itself. Everything in the exhibition whilst clearly dated and locked in the particularities of time, seems to exist in a permanent present, as if detached from the reality of the time where each was produced and functioning as if they are produced specifically in the context of this moment in time.

For Arnaoutopoulos, time is not necessarily specifically located within a distinct set of parameters that mark time as history, where objects serve as a context for history, effectively closing the potential of the object within a time as a reference to time as specific time. Instead Arnaoutopoulos creates works that operate through time regardless of time, and in the process opens the possibility of the objects to function across time, slipping effortlessly and elusively into an eternal present, free from the constraint and liminal capacities of time and histories.

Arnaoutopoulos himself, alludes to such a possibility when he suggests in discussion regarding the industrial surfaces and product-bi-product aspects about the works in the Eternity exhibition, that “my reality is that the factory is no longer the motivation or reference…my factory will be in my studio…that the splatter is developed within the studio”. Here Andrew clearly departs from the everyday demands of the real world into a world of potential imagination that is free from real world constraints and demands a world that finds infinite freedom to re-imagine both his own existence and his art and, in the process of such withdrawal, actively negates the real world. This is a substantial departure from the direct reference to the bi-product splatter that is the result of the industrial machine, his paintings are not necessarily the reference to the factory itself but more significantly to the unconscious randomness of the splatter without reference.

By removing the context, Arnaoutopoulos changes the discourse and opens up another universe of possibilities, a universe that functions outside his previous histories, a universe that is not directly and rationally observed as being linked to a constructed industrial bi-product, a universe that is continuously expanding infinitely. This is the eternity that Andrew Arnaoutopolos has opened himself up to, an eternity that has infinite possibilities to construct itself. An eternity that folds an multiplies infinitely, in a universe that is not conditioned by industrially constructed realities that result from the factories that commodify our reality, and are governed by the laws of consumption, but instead a universe that functions despite the how, what and why humans control. This eternity is itself a spatial eternity, where time itself is acknowledged and experienced in spatial terms. His canvases imply an infinite space in an expanding universe, where the splatter particles seem to be exploding in layered multiple directions, moving at infinite speeds into multiple dimensions.

What becomes immediately apparent when looking deeply at the abstraction clusters is the layered spatiality of each section of the cluster, or the spatiality of the clusters segments working as a whole, is the distinct absence of any recognizable human reference. As Helio Oiticica suggested ‘the problem with painting is resolved by the destruction of the picture’, or in other words the destruction of the traditional values and virtues of painting, by incorporating the very idea of painting into the dimensions of space and time as a radical redefinition of paintings potential in an expanded and expanding world, whilst opening up a field of possibilities that do not rely on or conform to the world we inhabit but in the possibilities that enable us to imagine and think outside such liminal endgames.

This absence of known man-made references suggests a space beyond human knowledge, understanding or experience. This is not a space that dialogues the human condition in terms of representation, but instead, a space or multiple spaces that asks the question of who we are in relation to the infinite universe that we inhabit on a planet that is a mere microdot within the universe.

 A space that exceeds even the capacities of painting and of the canvas itself, as well as the capacities of the artists intentions, for at the moment of making the artist has no control whatsoever of the process of making the work. The splatter marks whilst propelled by the artist develop their own momentum in relation to their impact and the splatter that results is completely absent of any painterly intention. To a large extent the splatter works not unlike a celestial collision perhaps when a comet travels across millions of years across the universe only to crash on another celestial body whose own path coincidentally intersects with that of the comet. Our earth and our nearest planetary relation in the solar system bears much evidence of such interstellar collisions or in the context of Arnaoutopoulos’s works the splatter is evidence of such a collision between material forms.

A space that alludes more appropriately to the latest deep space scientific research in quantum physics or cosmology and the origins of the universe, or in a relational sense the exact opposite, to a space of atomization of all matter to its molecular composition, but either way that eternity or the infinite that leads to a disappearance of all things within space and time. A space that transcends all realities into the realm of infinite possibilities.

His Samos Blue Abstract installation of 16 variously sized blue and white panels, on the one hand functions as homage to the island of Samos where he was born, and on the other functions as a metaphorical deconstruction of the island. Like every migrant no matter how many times he returns to visit, he knows intuitively deep inside himself that he can never be of that island as he can never be of another island, Australia and that his in-betweenness is suggests he has disappeared from both possibilities despite his circumstances. In actuality the paintings are the result of visiting the dilapidated leprosy hospital which lay in ruin on Samos, and examining the peeling paint of the empty hospital walls, where its structure, like the bodies of leprosy patients who once resided there in isolation, like aliens, were peeling in a process of bodily decomposition and disappearance. In either interpretation the meaning lies in the notion of the disappearing body, where the body transcends itself willingly or not into another space or time where the body itself does not exist. Here Arnaoutopoulos uses the vernacular of painting effects to conceptual and spiritual ends.

Industrial White on White-no liability, renegotiates a suite of 5 white paintings damaged by a forklift penetrating all canvases whilst being transported for exhibition in Melbourne’s Sutton Gallery in 1995, into a Judd - style installation standing vertically, parallel to each other on a pallet with a length of steel penetrating the original scars left by the forklift. Originally, they were an indirect reference to a Parthenon marble frieze, where the white was not pure but marbled with a grey strata, as well as politically motivated reference to the Australian flag with its inbuilt colonial British symbolic referent, but presented as a dirty white, colonizing and corrupted white that had violated and oppressed the traditional indigenous owners of this Australian land. Again Arnaoutopoulos presents a double and impossible dilemma of identity that attempts to understand and come to terms with at the histories that proceeded him, and not unlike Robert Ryman produces a kind of dissolution between the trace and its organic referent through a gestural attitude of un-painting that not only refutes and denies the historical position of painting itself but more significantly undermines the power of the original image. The white on white not only covers the idea of the original but in its dissolution it absolutely refuses its power. In the process Arnaoutopoulos approaches the condition of white on white as stated by Malevich “I have metamorphosed myself into zero forms” in the unfigurable, which he goes on to state “the free white abyss, infinity are before us” as a reference to objectless and the void as “the essence of diversity…the non figurative being, the objectless world”, a clear indication of his commitment to painting as a search for a new structure, a new way of being, and of a new signification. Such tendencies are present intuitively in Arnaoutopoulos’s intentionality as for him the white on white is more than erasure but a freeing of possibilities that the white presents. In this regard the white on white doubles as both a spiritual possibility but also as a criticism of the ideology that exists beneath or behind the white on white surface, which is a product of history and a culturally determined form.

Eternity transcends the specific conditions of the medium of painting in the construction of meaning. There is no perspective in the pictorial sense in this decentred space of the infinite, as nothing seems to converge on a single point that serves to subjugate infinity within the limits of the finite. Arnaoutopoulos is concerned with the very nature of his being as he conveys to the viewer another way of looking, thinking and being in this world that is conceptually and philosophically so different from the world that we exist in, and his eternity reveals an existence that we need to imagine beyond this world.