INSIDE AND OUT

AN AMUSING PHYSICS Marcel Duchamp (1)

Jacqueline Doughty

The paintings and sculptures of Robert Owen play perceptual tricks on the viewer and engage our innate tendency to search for patterns and ordering principles. This instinct finds its purest form in the disciplines of mathematics and physics, which are essentially studies into the numerical laws that underpin the world around us. There are elements of both disciplines in Owen’s work; however, when speaking to me about his 2006 sculptural series Florentia, the artist suggested I forget about physics and focus on the poetry.

Owen generates the complex, tangled forms of the Florentia sculptures through a process of play – rotating and interweaving straight lines in space until he finds a form that works. Constructed of intertwined lengths of steel, each painted a different colour, the sculptures are intended to be sited outdoors. As their title suggests, their forms are reminiscent of flowers and, when walking around them in a garden setting, one can almost imagine petals unfolding. It is typical of Owen’s richly associative practice that these hard-edged sculptures, which initially appear to be exercises in minimal abstraction, can yield to such allusive readings. Still, my mind keeps coming back to numbers.

The starting point for the Florentia sculptures is a 64-square flat grid, onto which the artist plots eight points. Picture these points as nodes or hinges, which can be grasped and pulled out into space. The lines between the nodes become the twelve edges of a cube, but a cube that has exploded and twisted in upon itself. There are no right angles, no parallel sides, just an intriguing jumble of overlapping lines enclosing empty space. Move around the sculptures and the relationships between the lines shift. With each change of perspective, the edges appear to regroup and the negative spaces expand and contract. Both static and fluid, the structure of these tangled cubes does not alter, but somehow the spatial relationships do.

This paradox intrigues the furtive physicist inside us all. Even the most innumerate soul could not move through space without an instinctive ability to calculate distance, mass, speed and trajectory. Owen’s work activates an analytical process of perception that is inherent in every viewer. When standing in front of his paintings, our eyes skip from section to section, comparing relationships between colours and configurations; when walking around his sculptures, our eyes adjust for changes in perspective and work to fix the borders of shapes that keep changing their form. This visual dance is what makes the deceptively simple geometries of Robert Owen’s work so mesmerising.

Owen’s tangled cubes have come to the attention of Stephen Hyde, a physicist at the Australian National University, who sees parallels between the artist’s playful manipulations of form and space and his own research into knot theory and molecular structure. It is a fitting conclusion to a tussle between poetry and physics, to reflect on a serendipitous correspondence between the intuitive structures of a visual artist and the rigorous calculations of a geometrical physicist. It allows a momentary hope that intuition will triumph over logic, when really we know that any successful endeavour must include a little of both.

Jacqueline Doughty is Program Manager, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne

(1) Marcel Duchamp, quoted by George Alexander in Transits, Wagga Wagga City Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga, NSW, 1988, p. 17.


BEYOND THE MIND

Melissa Amore

'Artists work intuitively. You try to establish a relationship with the canvas, a dialogue with the invisible, with ideas, sensation, impressions and the tactile apprehension of things.' Robert Owen

Robert Owen engages with the invisible wonder of sensual perception and light. Through his intuition of space and form, Owen is known for his ongoing multi-sensory investigation of colour, geometry and phenomenology. He has gravitated from documenting the rhythm of light to simulating light as a coloured rhythm.

This most recent series, ‘Music for the Eyes’, 2005–06, is a passionate response to a selective range of music including Arvo Part’s Alina and Georges Gurdjieff’s extraordinary Chants, Hymns and Dances. Owen intuitively creates an emotive translation from the musical sound into visible notations of rhythm and colour that play music for the eyes.

He imagines in colour and sounds, in chromatic phrases and structures. ‘Music for the Eyes’ is a re-visitation and an extension of Cadence #1 (A short span of time) from the ‘Text of Light’ series, produced in 2003. Cadence essentially denotes a rhythm, a measured movement.

The continual stimulus for Owen is the possibility of whether emotion can be recorded and sensual experience understood via an alternate means. Owen is allowing the viewer to, at the very least, experience the sensation of what musical perception would look like if it were tangible. The process is, technically speaking, unscientific yet controlled. Owen paints from a structure that is essentially void of mathematical formula, and colour is ultimately selected at random.

The placement and colour composition is integral to Owen’s overall landscape; they vibrate a chaotic order, creating a logic to the idea of experiencing sound. At first glance these complex maps appear as fragmented computer codes and are reminiscent of Owen’s LED wall featured on the Craigieburn Bypass, Melbourne’s northern gateway.(1)

Owen has essentially created a hyper-reality, where the representation of sensation becomes fundamentally more valuable, for the process of understanding, than the experience of it. The 2005–06 paintings Heartland, Blue Note and Witness – Facing East (from the music of G. I. Gurdjieff, Chant from a Holy Book) are intended to transport the viewer from one state of awareness to another – to a space beyond the mind. This state poses as a meditative consciousness predicated on sensation, inviting new possibilities for the way we experience painting. ‘Sensation’, Owen says, ‘can take you somewhere else, so in a sense sensation is the trigger. We all get those feelings from music. It transports you and it is this transportation that connects you to the other and larger whole.’

Witness demonstrates Owen’s acuteness and accuracy of colour relationships. The flow of bends, pauses and blocks of colour create a whole form within the parts. The colour becomes the rigid structure and the force inverts back into itself, dynamically changing yet remaining constant.

Owen has continued to explore his iconic ultramarine blue throughout this piece, reinstating the relationship between the colour blue and the idea of blue as a mystical force, relating to the deep tones of the cello. The rhythmic motion is travelling in an upward direction and the thickened black lines appear as a static melancholy state, with the scattered colour blocks measuring contradictory emotions. The gaps appear just as pertinent as the coloured beats, as all the elements in the painting – line, contour and colour – form a continuous relationship to each other.

These colour-coded rhythms become another readable language that forces the viewer to decode beyond the mind’s eye. They become optical contemplations albeit musical in notation, as pitch is illustrated via hue, narrative via movement and tone via colour.

Owen has continued his ongoing exploration with the association attached to the universal terms ‘perception’ and ‘sensation’. This series brings to ‘light’ the very spiritual essence of colour, sound and movement. You can’t help but ‘feel’ the presence and ‘hear’ the ‘voice’ of Owen himself when confronted by these intelligible compositions.

Melissa Amore is a freelance writer based in Melbourne

(1) The LED wall was inspired by Owen witnessing a flickering TV screen via a lace curtain, which generated a matrix of multi-shifting colours.