Aida Tomescu has an ecumenical faith in the capacity of art, literature and music to alter our lived experience. Her devotion to painting is unquestioned but so too is her faith in Dostoevsky, Celan, in Shostakovich. These shared convictions demonstrate an uncommon sensibility, one that celebrates the metaphysical, the abstract and the profound and she was to find this in the work of Colin McCahon more than thirty years ago.

Aida speaks about McCahon with the same thrill and reverence that she speaks of Titian and Giotto, of Guston & Cezanne. What they hold is an intellectual weight and a profound content freed of illustration and description. This capacity to hold a long thread of attention between two points is fundamental to the making of good art, music and literature. 

Colin McCahon is Tomescu’s antipodean window, one she didn’t expect to see through let alone open for us all.

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Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow probably didn’t have Marilyn Monroe in mind and nor she when she famously said “I defy gravity”. For a time Marilyn certainly seemed to as her star soared, resisting the weight of expectation before gravity, combined with the pressures of fame caused her to come crashing down.

Our common understanding of Newtonian gravity is apprehended through the body and the forces that act upon us and certainly, my rather flimsy appreciation of the science doesn’t allow for any useful insight into the physics of it. The notion of gravity – one that is about force and perhaps even about the pressure that the best artworks can exert equally on our body and our consciousness, is one that if we are fortunate, we might experience from time to time with art.

Each of these painters leverage the science, co-opting the relentless agency of nature to assist in their making – but none are beholden to it, indeed some flat our resist it  These are not ‘paintings as hypothesis’ – systemic experiments seeking proof of anything. Indeed, my sense is that they are delighted when their laboratory experiments goes awry. Out of fluidity and flux comes opportunity.

For Ian Davenport, John Armleder and Paul Czerlitzki in particular, gravity encourages their material’s (mis)behaviour – Koen Delaere, Mark Francis, Ingo Meller and Callum Innes chose to work both with and against this invisible force in the pursuit of an esoteric dualism. All appreciate that exploring and exposing evidence of the fundamental forces that determine the actuality of our world, offers them the possibility to express something fundamental about our shared experience, it’s perpetuity and our fragile limitations. 

These partnerships between intention, material and physical action and their diverse consequences utterly transcend any notion of process and speak to systems that are as much unknown as known. This leap of faith that each take on the springboard of making is at the heart of our fascination with what they do and express each day and even if, like Marilyn and Icarus, flight is temporary, levitation remains the most alluring trick.

For Gravity, Fox Jensen has assembled major artworks by some of the most serious and considered painters working today. We are humbled by their support of this exhibition and look forward to seeing you.

Andrew Jensen, April 2026

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 Johnny Rotten Holidays In The Sun 1977

 
There have been few moments of such symbolic social and political union as the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the demolition of this horrifying barricade came an almost universal restoration of hope and faith. Yet little more than 25 years later, one can hardly believe that a political rally in the re-drawn West, the so-called “land of the free,” could be fueled by the moronic chant to  “build the wall.”
 
Amidst the Cold War, Johnny Rotten saw the Berlin Wall as a kind of modern stand-in for Nietzsche’s philosophy “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.” The implication being that accusations of moral decay and chaos are most often a reflection of one’s own character. The wall is less a wall than a mirror and that anxiety, inequities and corruption exist on both sides.

Jan Albers was just 18 when the Berlin Wall came down. By that time such was its promised potential for social and philosophical healing that Sir Elton had written Nikita and Nena had set free 99 Luftballons – so any chance it was going to outlast the Reagan and Gorbachov détente was slim. Popular culture had the bit between its teeth and Sir Elton was coming for Nikita despite the flagging resistance of ten tin soldiers.
 
It is hard not to see Jan Albers’ grand chainsaw massacre works as fragment of a wall, be it Berlin or another. The sense of them being a geological remnant, a fragment from an earlier brutalist age is strong. His decision to enclose them in a clear Perspex box immediately shifts our perception of them from rubble to relic. The notion that an object might magically morph from raw or ‘found’ status to conceptual/aesthetic object by virtue of context is not new, of course. And though Albers certainly isn’t taking up the mantra of Dada, as a student at the Kunst Académie Dusseldorf, he adopted a post-punk approach to authority, and indeed to painting, preferring to cut, burn and even chain-saw his forms. Whilst these are sculptures that allude to mysterious artifacts, their repeated architectonic compositions, especially in the “wedges” imbues them with a crisper, even classical formality. Albers might’ve resisted the protocols of painting, certainly the ceremony of neatly folding linen corners, especially when the allure of setting to with a chainsaw or a flame-thrower beckoned. But what he couldn’t quite set aside were the fundamental attractions of colour and light. In this sense he is just as much a disciple of Monet as Duchamp…. Impressionism meets the concrete block.
 
It is Albers’ conflation of sculpture and painting that places his work in the lineage of Donald Judd and certain aspects of Imi Knoebel, both of whom, like Albers, seem dissatisfied with the confinements of painting. The desire to liberate painting from the easy seduction of the pictorial is vital for Albers’ work too, whether it takes the form of the faceted wedges, or the chainsaw massacres he is intent on escaping the restrictive orthodoxies that history establishes..
 
The hybridity of his approach gives the works a flamboyant contemporaneity and Albers himself sees the studio as a working Tardis that jettisons him into the future – to infinity and beyond. The desire to see one’s own work unshackled from history might appear to wilfully deny aspects of the works complex genealogy but Albers is determinedly forward facing in all that he does. For all their connections these are artifacts from the future.

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Olivier Messiaen was Professor of Harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. This sounds as much a diplomatic post rather than one devoted solely to music. Perhaps it is indeed the case, that musical composition depends on relationships and on the negotiation of space and time.  That some form of rapprochement between factions is needed to co-exist is also a demand made of painting. Unfortunately, one sees entirely too much easing of tensions – but not in Tomescu.

The new paintings of Aida Tomescu take many of their titles from the composer Messiaen and whilst she is appropriately reluctant to see her works as anything other than the resolution of their own demands and desires, the ecumenical approach that Messiaen took to music, from cultures outside of the western canon – Hindu rhythms and Japanese music for example, demonstrate something that is fundamental to Tomescu’s mature painting. 

More than ever before Tomescu’s paintings reject the monotheism and orthodoxies of the western canon – less so the art history that has always been the foundation of her passion and shapes an essential understanding of painting, but her increasing use of colour as a profound structural element, something Messiaen would’ve assented to, and critically the relationships that exist between time and music, between time and painting and between colour and sound.

The chromesthesia that Messiaen embraced – seeing colour as chords and vice versa is something that one might easily ascribe or rather adopt in looking at Tomescu’s increasingly symphonic works. For these are paintings where pitch and crescendo, silence and transition work, as Messiaen would’ve wanted, in harmony. 

The installation of Messiaen in the new FOX JENSEN/SYDNEY will allow for the presentation of Tomescu’s work with appropriate scale and generosity. Each panel that Tomescu paints is made at full reach. This calibration to body feels crucial to the works capacity to invite attention through sensation as much as through cognition. 

The presentation of each panel as an open field where the body of the pigment, in concert with the of constructive strokes, promotes colour itself as a structuring element – one that opens the space, granting access to both a concrete and a metaphorical architecture where one experiences their rhythms, transitions and intricacies. 

As diptychs and triptychs, the physical extent of the paintings becomes truly panoramic and the invitation they extend to move along their full breadth gives these paintings an amplitude and volume that is heightened even further.

New colours – yellow and violet, orange and luminous whites invest the paintings with an incandescence and celebration that mark her most compelling works.

Fox Jensen Sydney is thrilled to be presenting Messiaen, Tomescu’s fifth solo exhibition with the galleries. 

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But as much as these paintings have flowers as their subject, they are, as Juliet described of Romeo “a rose by any other name would smell so sweet.” For the inherent quality of these ‘flower paintings’ is less the flower and more the paint. Their essential character, like Montague, ought not to be captive of the name.

Each painter here uses their shared material in profoundly differing ways and yet each arrive at the conclusion that these fragile motifs insinuate something fundamental to our fugitive existence. But let’s not be so bleak… for as poignant as each is, there is a celebratory spirit that overcomes the rhythm of decay. Furthermore, their vivacity as paintings, their precociousness and their material poetry is really what is at stake.

Lawrence Carroll’s Untitled 2014-17 will always be for Emma and I, one of the most poignant works we have ever presented. We had, on Lawrence’s invitation, journeyed to Bolsena, north of Rome and spent two days in his company, in his studio and in the extended embrace of his wife Lucy. Emma and I were charmed by them, by Lawrence, his humour, his ease and his insight – smitten by his work… and we remain so. Lawrence’s raw Arte Povera aesthetic cut a fresh and rough-hewn track right through the centre of our gallery. Then like a daylily he was gone. What we have in his absence is a sublime yet modest collage of the scavenging brilliance of Carroll. Flimsy cotton, plastic flowers and housepaint… no fine cedar stretchers here, no crisp folds of linen but there is everything one could ever desire and it exists to us as a memento vivere.

Bianca Raffaella’s paintings exist on the edge of visibility. Elusive, fleeting, dreamlike perhaps. She offers us a hint of physicality. Her blooms are barely there but what they repress in physicality they assert in atmosphere. Pigment brushes up against the linen in soft caresses that insinuate presence and form. Raffaella’s own vision impairment has ironically heightened her sensitivity, and these paintings demonstrate that the tools that we regard as crucial to recognition and apprehension, even sensation – can be substituted for other faculties if only we would close our eyes so as to see..

Gideon Rubin’s paintings share something of this understatement though his work is rooted in a knowing and astute description. He is however cautious about the amount of data required, preferring to compress his image making in favour of innuendo. Whether it is a flower, or an isolated figure, Rubin’s observation of deportment is perceptive and discerning. The undemonstrative brushwork that he employs is critical in his determination not to distract, to lead us away from the fundamentally human proposition that he makes evident with each painting. For all of this reductive clarity these are paintings that can seduce us with nostalgia, turn our heads with intimation, quicken our pulse with playful voyeurism; yet their magic lies in Rubin’s ability to make judgements about tone and placement. He and we understand that the success or otherwise depends on these being solved only as paintings.

And then there are the paintings of Niyaz Najafov. The antithesis to Raffaella’s delicacy and Rubin’s knowing observation. These full force paintings explode into existence. If Bianca’s paintings are on the edge of visibility, these are simply on the edge. These paintings are over-ripe, fecund, roiling with psychological vandalism. But amidst the intensity there is humour, doubtless dark but humour nonetheless. Niyaz’s flowers are dangerous, Triffid-like… cousins of Seymour’s demanding Venus flytrap in Little Shop of Horrors… stand close if you dare. Once the theatre of the work is understood then we are free to revel in the Soutine-like temerity of the pigment and the brushwork. There is no doubt that Najafov can draw, for his agitated line is crucial to the work, but it is the way that he masses pigment, pushing and tormenting it until it feels as if it could never have emerged from a tube, all smooth and alluringly viscous, that is most captivating.

Less voracious than Najafov but equally committed to speed and viscosity, the paintings of Robert Malherbe are most certainly the result of observation – but Malherbe’s eye is fast and restless. Like Rubin he is uploading data but doesn’t want to wait too long. Malherbe however does accumulate a great deal of memory in the end of his brush, and it becomes apparent the more we see. Like Rubin he is determined to solve the paintings on their own terms rather than be hostage to mere description, so that the works establish their own painterly veracity.

Aida Tomescu’s impressive diptych demonstrates a dramatic efflorescence – a flowering of pigment and energy across two open linen fields. This embrace of the linen as a foundational element in the spatial implications of the painting rather than an extension of the support has allowed Tomescu’s paintings to open, simultaneously outwards and inwards, establishing a physical and metaphorical space for the painting to build body and presence.

Rather than the more literal analogy of folds and petals, Tomescu delivers a folding of space where form and transition share in the ambition to make paintings of rare substance.

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The allure of graphite very much lies in its capacity to attract light, dance with it and at times swallow it whole, but before it achieves this range and amplitude it has to be coaxed into actuality. 

One thinks of the sculpture of Donald Judd and his strong advocacy for the “specific object” where repetition of forms gathers their own concrete reality and don’t aspire to hidden meaning or narrative. But in both Judd and Allen, such a fundamentalist position is not always easy to defend as material, be it aluminium or graphite, it can’t help but consort with light and ensnare the colours of the environment so that the experience of the works is shaped by the space in which it and the viewer participate.

This desire to collapse the distinction between the orthodox illusionary space of painting and the viewer is not uncommon – from Fra Angelico’s monastic cells at San Marco to Rothko’s Houston Chapel. One also thinks of the extraordinary frescoes of David Novros, where the symbiosis between architecture and form, between colour and atmosphere is so collaborative so as to place us inside the painting.

The modest scale of Matthew Allen’s paintings necessarily compresses this ambition, but crucially these are paintings often calibrated to the size of the head rather than the body. Thus, we are invited into close proximity with the works in an exchange that is much more tête-à-tête than Vitruvian.

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Gustav Mahler

The best painting neatly evades language in very much the same way that Mahler suggested music does. There ought to be no surprise in this and yet most days I am asked, with varying levels of agitation – what does this painting mean? As if by simply talking about it, the work may suddenly give up its secrets. 

It is true of course that sometimes a phrase may unlock something in the apprehension of a work but ultimately there is no substitute for consideration and looking – and being repeatedly told that you can meaningfully apprehend painting by reading more is like being told that you can learn to swim, if you’d just read the manual. 

Music, by virtue of its duration, invites at least some pause – from the three-minute pop-song to a full symphony – time is a pre-condition for engaging with music… unless you constantly skip to the next track – I blame Spotify and “playlists” in general. Were people inclined to spend the average length of a Ramones song looking at a painting they would most likely be found out for the impatient consumers they have lamentably become. Contemporary dance gives me ADHD so clearly none of us are perfect. 

So, when faced with a recalcitrant viewer, or one that simply seeks the easy reinforcement that description offers, I often resort to music as analogy. We can talk about tone, intensity, crescendos, spaces, texture, staccato, lyricism and heaven help us, mood… even emotion and as an enthusiastic agent of the plastic arts, giving people a way in, allowing them the opportunity to see something unexpected feels like a worthy goal and if this can be done without resorting to parables then hallelujah. 

Of course, some painting lends itself more seamlessly to these helpful analogies – hence “Plastic Soul”. And rather than the derisive connotations the term had when first coined to describe David Bowie’s flirtation with Detroit’s other great manufacture, I love it. Daffy as it may sound, these works all have ‘soul’ – that all too elusive quality that separates pretension from authenticity. 

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