Conversation: Clinton Garofano & Carole Roberts — 20 October to 4 November 2006

Absolute truths are not the concern of the works in this exhibition ‘conversation’. Clinton Garofano and Carole Roberts come together through their paintings to create a dialogue between Garofano’s interest in Buddhist teachings on impermanence and Roberts’s interest in changing energy within nature. Garafano and Roberts have been colleagues since the mid 1980s. As well as their solo exhibition careers, they have participated in several group exhibitions together.

Their works appear to sit in completely different registers: dark and foreboding from Garofano, light and animated from Roberts. However, what we are shown is not simple dualism but different aspects from the same focus of contemplation.

Garafano’s work in this exhibition consists of ten darkly painted antique frames, modest in scale. Inside each is text in a comic-strip typeface, painted with a black background on glass. Each frame contains a colloquial statement—‘dead obvious’ and ‘dead serious’ are examples. Here language is prescribing a meaning of absoluteness to the word ‘death’. Buddhist teachings regard death as just a transition point in this life. Death therefore is not absolute or finite, nor is it something that is necessarily feared.

Carole Roberts, Energy painting, 2006. Installation view

Carole Roberts, Golden Canopy, 2006. Acrylic on canvas (Detail)

Carole Roberts’s interest in spatial concerns has manifested in both her public design projects and art works, incorporating ancient architectural motifs and using primary materials such as tree branches and metals such as lead. The alchemists’ dream of transmuting base metal into gold was a process they often symbolised as the purification of the soul. In her new Energy Paintings Roberts has mobilised the metaphysical properties of her earlier works into intense pigments of gold, blue and pink suspended within leaf motifs that rest upon a white ground.

Garafano’s and Roberts’s works in this exhibition show us the ‘beingness’ of existence and, for them, that is enough.

Downloads

Opening talk by Craig Judd, Senior Curator of Art, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, on 21 October 2006. > Download as pdf
Conversation: Garofano and Roberts by Carole Roberts, October 2006. > Download as pdf