by Dan Glover.

One night, after a Sunday sesh at Cottesloe’s OBH, my housemates and I had the (maybe not too shark-cautious) urge to plunge ourselves into the midnight ocean’s inky abyss. Heavy with wet clothes, tipsy from one too many pints, we emerged from the icy depths to the cold sand. Here I turned around to witness the unsettling sight of bobbing seagulls transformed into glistening dots by a harsh stream of fluorescent lights. Like ghosts, bound to our world by their craving for seafood leftovers, they haunted this communal shoreline, with the faint twinkling of freighter lights outlining the horizon behind them. As the sea and sky congealed into a black mass, it was a visually disorienting experience, one that has been manifested by the hand of artist Jacob Kotzee in his work Beach. The painting sits within Kotzee’s Stala Contemporary solo show Arrangements—a body of works exploring the jarring and disfiguring effects of artificial light that seems to pervade all facets of our contemporary world. In the obscured, oozing realm of Kotzee’s paintings, it is not just the sky and sea that merge into one—it is also flowerbeds, stage sets and gravesites. It’s an ambitious project, with each image reminiscent of candid phone snaps taken on a late-night walk, only to be deleted to free up some extra camera storage. Yet, Kotzee thoughtfully embraces each image as if it were charged with the sentiment of a family keepsake.
        The paintings within this show are reminiscent of Instagram collages of ‘liminal spaces’—fabricated photos of rooms and scenes that feel tangibly familiar yet escape specific memory. This sentiment particularly emerges in Shadow, 8:03pm. Here, the outside wall of an unidentified building is seen bathed in the warm glow of a streetlamp, its light adorning the façade save for the cast shadow of a palm tree. The scene looks and feels transitory, like you’re standing outside a friend’s home, waiting for them to let you in. Consequently, when I look at this painting, I am reminded of and feel the sentiment that such moments evoke—often a gnawing anxiety—but I cannot recall specific instances. Such memories are recalled through that familiar, warm, street lamp glow. These objects possess the Australian suburbia, lining the streets and highways, freeways and roads. The lights serve to reproduce the sunlight that illuminates our paths and the flowerbeds that line them—as will be seen in Hamburg Flowers, 10:58pm. But the glow of a light bulb follows a specific path, outlined by a graduating shadow that bleeds into darkness. The multiplicity of these light channels results in duplicating shadows that darken at points of intersection, convincingly captured in Shadow 8:03pm. Kotzee achieves this visuality through variations in the paint’s thickness, as the parts of the wall bathed in light are opaque whilst the shadows shift in translucency and tone. As the shadows reach the light, the paint gradually becomes thicker, with each represented idea melding into each other.
        The intensity of transitions between these two painterly states of opacity and translucency pertains to the presence of artificial light. Within the pulsating work Stage, a wash of crimson red and deep blue fills the canvas, carefully constructed to suggest figuration, yet denying one’s ability to determine subjects or objects. The title asks the viewer to access subconscious knowledge of what a stage holds—instruments, performers, sets—yet none are found, save for the lightbulbs. These luminous objects are either blurred into abstracted lines and shapes that suggest movement, or are thick, painterly orbs of bright white frozen in place– reminiscent of Beach’s bobbing seagulls. It is not until viewing Stage II, a work that centrally possesses a small alcove in the gallery space, that the figure of a performer is barely seen, with the blinding stage lights abstracting a body into its essential parts—legs, arms, torso, head. Each limb bleeds into the surrounding stage, lacking any sense of identity. These two works provide a visual language for Kotzee’s second engagement with artificial lights, as he explores what happens to an image once such light sources are shone back onto the viewer. As in Fireworks, where colourful Christmas lights turn the surrounding room into an empty void, to look at these lights obscures specific surroundings. Conversely, when lights are shone onto a surface, the scene they illuminate becomes an ethereal world that sits between night and day (as in Beach and Shadow, 8:03pm). In each of these engagements, artificial light sources obscure specific points in linear time, and through this Kotzee succeeds in further removing the viewer from an exact location—an effect emphasised by the generalised titles of each work (Beach, Flowerbed, Moss). The title of the work Hamburg Flowers, 10:58pm might suggest a specific kind of flower, but instead only offers the viewer a general place, a time of day, and the kind of thing captured. This informs the visual construction of the painting, as generic flowers are rendered into each other, formulating a flat image with depth only suggested by tonal variation. It is reminiscent of a phone screen. The blooms appear to glow back at me, and the picture itself is one that I would expect my mum to send me to show what new flowers have sprung up in her garden.
        Each of the images discussed or mentioned thus far disregard conventional methods of image construction. Rather than providing the viewer with appropriate distancing and structural context to clarify the scene, each painting instead cuts into the world they represent. For instance, the work Flowerfield depicts an entangled mass of blooms, stems, and leaves that are diffused into one another. When first viewing this work, I was reminded of the garden scenes painted by Gustav Klimt that likewise depict green masses of vegetation adorned in bright blossoms. Yet, Klimt chose to segregate each bloom by their respective kind to represent a typically cohesive, European garden bed. Kotzee instead allows each bloom to layer on top of and bleed into one another, capturing the beautifully chaotic growth of nature strips bathed in LED lights. Further, the framing of Flowerfield cuts off both the earthly base of the flowers and the sky above that they attempt to grow towards, creating their own snapshot-like realm. It is a visual language that is utilised throughout the paintings of this show, as Kotzee’s Arrangements transform into the blurred vision of nightlife.
        Surrounded by such engagements, the works Curtains and Curtains II feel quite bizarre and disjointed in the exhibition. Each painting is mounted on either side of a small wall that forms part of the entrance between the gallery’s foyer and the main exhibition space. Both paintings depict the same setting—a heavy, red curtain that is slightly parted to reveal a dark realm beyond, with leaves and objects peering through. Curtains is the more successful of the two, employing the same visual language of artificiality established thus far—thick paint for objects in the light taunted by a consuming, translucent shadow that absorbs the objects within it. Where Curtains II fails to convince me of its attempted ambiguity is its harsh rigidity that culminates in the thick, red curtain that feels noticeably heavier than that seen in its counterpart painting. The framing contributes to the staged feeling of the work, its opacity awkwardly diverging from the painterly techniques employed in the surrounding works. Combined with its placement in the gallery, Curtains II is like the weird shy sibling of this otherwise cohesive family of paintings, timidly hanging out in the corner of the room. But, despite its flaws, the painting’s subject still sits nicely within Kotzee’s inquiry into the artificial realm that reveals, alongside Stage, the apparent absence of performers and, moreso, of bodies that encounter these spaces.
        What intrigues me most about Kotzee’s Arrangements is that memory is not kindled by the faces or bodies of people, but the things that surround and frame these perceptions. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates claims that the process of remembering things starts with the visual perceptions and thoughts that surround an experience.[1] These images are then imprinted into the mind—likened to a wax tablet—that can be accessed visually to help remember an event. It’s an idea closely linked to our compulsion to capture nights out with friends to savour the moment. But upon the mendable surface of memory, some images don’t last, and instead become obscured by the deteriorating rift of time. Kotzee depicts such sentiments through his use of a shifting, bleeding application of oil paint and the disorienting effects of haphazard compositions. It is a beautifully achieved combination that reveals Kotzee’s thoughtful handling of the medium that deviates from its norms to elevate his subject matter. Each painting feels intangibly familiar through Kotzee’s tender embrace of the mundane and unflattering light of street lamps, whose undistinctive (and, by sheer ubiquity, distinctive) ambience is so essential to inscribing a night’s memories upon the mind. Engaging with the show awakens this ebbing pond of past moments, untethered from fixed points in time by the disorienting effects of artificial light.

Jacob Kotzee, Arrangements, Stala Contemporary, 19 October – 9 November 2024.

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Footnotes:

1. Plato, “Theaetetus,” in Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Harold N. Fowler (London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1921), 191c-191d. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0172%3Atext%3DTheaet.%3Asection%3D191d

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Images: Exhibition photography of Jacob Kotzee’s Arrangements at Stala Contemporary. Photography by Scott Burton.