Viewer, take the title, Paintwork, as an invitation, a challenge that asks you to work as well! If you are inclined to mentally unwrap Adsett’s painting, you will engage with his wit, and appreciate the care and precision of his working method. 

And he proceeds with so few components. Take the smaller works, which have a sideways movement - like slides being pushed into a projector: there are black and white rectangles, and a shape that seems to enclose them, like a frame. 

Stand on an angle to the work and you will note that the thin edges are also painted. This was done not just to give a perfect finish; they will prove to be integral to the structure of the whole.

A simple examination of Number I opens the door to understanding the rest. What do we have: a framed black rectangle? Sure. But rather than standing prominently inside the frame like a figure, it also lies beneath it, making a connection with the vertical band of black that wraps around the left side. At this point, our measuring instinct discovers that the rectangle has become a black square, a pronounced figure, geometrically speaking. But is it really a figure, when truncated and submerged like this? Wouldn’t we claim that the white frame is the only figure here? And what about the other side of the work? See that very fine line of black within the frame: doesn’t it also slide under it, to meet up with the right edge? Pausing to assess, we seem to have a larger quantity of black in Number I than we first thought. By taking on this ‘viewer-work,’ attempting to locate what sits on top, or slides underneath, we find that figuration occurring anywhere is put into doubt! This is what Peter Adsett’s abstraction is all about: making black and white negotiate as to which will read as figure.

By now, you have all the clues needed to play the game. Up until Number IV, that is. This diptych should be a culmination of the series, but with the inclusion of a real frame, the tables have been turned. Apparently, we are looking at the back of the painting. If so, how come its black and white centre matches up with the other side of the diptych, which gives us the front?

With Number IV we have the start of a different enterprise. No longer shifting fictional characters around the board, we have entered real space. What confronts us is the wooden stretcher itself, together with the frayed ends of the linen that is affixed to it, staples, and uncontrolled splashes of black paint. In short: the side of the painting that faces the wall – and is not meant to be seen. 

We have gone well beyond painted black and white ‘figures,’ perceived in a present moment. With the reverse of the painting, we are in a time, somewhere in the past, in which processes occurred, actions in a studio. With Number IV, the artist conjoins the two words, ‘paint’ and ‘work,’ and in so doing, he embraces those spectators who are playing the game. 

Most of my work over the years is about the frame and the viewer. I’m framing the viewer. Doesn’t it sound like a crime scene!

The other, larger paintings on show are clearly related to the series described above, but deal more overtly with frame-as-figure. Spectators can decipher the play here as well.

If painting can be thought of as a dialogue between a sender and a receiver, the function of the frame is critical. Adsett emphasises that function in two main ways. Firstly, as with the small paintings, the figurative squares and rectangles are decentred. Conversely, frames are permitted to leave their rightful place at the edges of the support, and invade the centre as figures. 

Frames around pictures are there to accentuate an impassable border between real space (that of the wall, the room, and the spectator), and the fictive space of the picture within. A viewer cannot inhabit the latter, except in imagination. What happens when the respective roles of frame and picture are exchanged? 

The artificial ‘light’ of the painting becomes one with the external, natural light (see how the white edges of the stretcher are made to bleed into the wall.) And in this way, the space of the spectator is converted into the space of painting. As the quote above suggests, Peter has always stressed that his paintings operate on us bodily, as well as cognitively. The tension in the work, caused by black and white reversing roles as figure or ground, is to be “felt as a jolt.”

This abstraction is ultimately a structural critique of the medium of painting itself, drawing our attention to painting’s relationship to human perception.

– Text by Mary Alice Lee

Catalogue

1. Paintwork number 1, 2023, Acrylic on linen, 135 x 122 x 3cm, AUD$32,000

2. Paintwork number 2, 2023, Acrylic on linen, 135 x 122 x 3cm, AUD$32,000

3. Paintwork number 3, 2023, Acrylic on linen, 135 x 122 x 3cm, AUD$32,000

4. Paintwork number 4, 2023, Acrylic on linen, 135 x 122 x 3cm, AUD$32,000

5. Paintwork number 5, 2023, Acrylic on linen, 135 x 122 x 3cm, AUD$32,000

6. Paintwork 4Sq. No.1, 2023, Acrylic on linen, 82 x 64 x 4cm, AUD$20,000

7. Paintwork 4Sq. No.2, 2023, Acrylic on linen, 82 x 64 x 4cm, AUD$20,000

8. Paintwork 4Sq. No.3, 2023, Acrylic on linen, 82 x 64 x 4cm, AUD$20,000

9. Paintwork 4Sq. No.4 (diptych), 2023, Acrylic on linen, 82 x 128 x 4cm, AUD$30,000

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acknowledgements

Painting: Peter Adsett
Text: Mary-Alice Lee
Artwork documentation: Felix Adsett
Photography: Document Photography
Images: Courtesy of the © artist & PAULNACHE