ROD PATTENDEN profiles an artist who works magic to create images that are both haunting and seductive...

Daily life radiates with images that are perfectly formed, that give the gloss to lives that we apprehend as a simulacra of perfection, radiating health and a state of heightened sheen. Wet with perfection, our eyes are trained in this media culture to overlook the shadows of imperfection, that uniqueness that is always marked with a blemish, stained by the human. It is this state of ‘photoshop’ smoothness of the virtual reality of the world that is under dissolution in the shifting shivering works of Rodney Pople. This artist has a particular capacity for repositioning the viewer as an embodied eye, anxious, alert and aware of the far-from-perfect conditions of the postmodern world. Pople’s paintings are incongruous and unstable, evoking a state of anxiety and unease, requiring the viewer to look more deeply into the subtle hints that the artist offers. These blemishes and stains, this residue may be of more interest, if not insight, than the clever gloss of speech, rhetoric and skin-deep beauty. More eloquently, there operates in this body of work an uncanny prickly sensation that shivers through one’s recognition like some afterimage — a flicker of shadow — or a numinous vibration. The stability of things is shaken and apprehension is not easily found. We have to work harder, look further, and find our own point of reference.

Rodney Pople, Flourescent Afternoon, 2008, archival ink, oil, watercolour on Hahnmuhle paper, 78 x 106cm. Courtesy the artist and Australian Galleries, Sydney.

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