‘THE CURIOUS NATURE of AETHER’

Louise Feneley at Lennox Street Gallery, Melbourne

This presentation of Louise Feneley’s painting at Lennox Street Gallery in Melbourne is indeed a tour de force. I would dare to say that it is breathtaking, not simply because the technical resolution is astonishing but because she appears to be addressing herself to invisibilities of an elemental nature like breath itself.

The exhibition presents paintings of a refined technical finesse and accomplishment that touches on both the magnitude of natural elements and the minutiae of ordinary things.

I have observed intermittently throughout the last decade that Louises’ painting has a consistent evocation of profundity and this is achieved without gratuitous effect, nothing is banal and yet nothing is exaggerated. This is rare in art. Louise observes with empathy and a deep visual attention, she is drawn to forms and materials of such fragility that cause most artists to falter or else to be merely approximate.

Ok, so what is ‘aether’?

According to ancient and medieval science ‘aether’ which is also known as the ‘fifth element’ or ‘quintessence’, is the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere.

Aspects of the Flemish and Dutch artists of previous centuries are here evoked; in their precision,  in their refinement, in their acute sense of balance but more significantly in the near representation of the invisible elements that elude our understanding and sustain our existence; the dimensions and the elements of time, space, atmosphere, air and spirit.

Louise is drawn to the numinous and to liminal transitions between opacity and transparency, to translucency and density and to the shimmer of light and mother of pearl opalescence. There is a subliminal aspect in all her imagery that is present in the simplicity and abstraction of her pearls and droplets and again in the surging complexity of the cold sea. Louises’ aesthetic is sensory but it is not entirely sensual, it is filtered through an astute intellect giving her work an authority that is profound and conceptual.

Clearly Louise loves nature but she is herein making art and her compositions most frequently present a pictorial space that rises up before us as a vertical visual field, a relative - distant as it is - to the celebrated abstractions of mid twentieth century painting. The effect of this is that rather than being merely appealing views of observed realities, they present themselves as icons to be revered and as ideas to be confronted, purposeful and challenging rather than passive images compliant with lifestyle decor.

She is indeed a master of the subtle and of the personal but Louises’work reaches into realms and ideas of universal urgency.

The career of an artist is most frequently difficult, I am sure that Louise knows this. She encounters a particular difficulty and I dare to describe that difficulty. In my experience the art community - despite its rhetoric, responds to ‘style’, style that is marked by familiarity and even popularity. Styles that come in clusters and in approved modes of practice. There is a quality of the ‘unique’ in Louise work and indeed in its ‘quintessential’ craftsmanship that is beyond emulation and this is yet another aspect of its extraordinary distinction.

Louise Feneley is an artist whose status is becoming more appropriately acknowledged within the Australian contemporary art community, and I suspect this body of work significantly extends that reputation .

Eugene and Lennox Street Gallery have done well to present this most remarkable exhibition.

My sincere congratulations to Louise.

Godwin Bradbeer

July 2024