A complex, multilayered show reflecting a creative man’s private life

Peter Maloney: Missing in Action. ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Kingsley Street, Acton. Until June 3, 2018.

Born in Western Australia in 1953, Peter Maloney commenced his art training at the Canberra School of Art before being shaped as an artist at the Victorian College of the Arts, studying under Gareth Sansom and Bea Maddock. In the late 1980s, Maloney embraced the Sydney arts scene and artists such as Tony Tuckson and those exhibiting with the Frank Watters and Geoffrey Legge galleries, and subsequently settled in Canberra.

Although he has maintained a high profile in Sydney and Canberra with frequent exhibitions, including solo shows at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra Museum and Gallery and the ANU School of Art Gallery, the body of work selected for this Drill Hall show is relatively unknown with much of it never before exhibited.

It consists of works on paper, selected by the curators Terence Maloon and Tony Oates, and is drawn from an apparently huge oeuvre created over the past few decades. Personally, I found it difficult to negotiate my way around the exhibition to receive an understanding of the show as the work of a single artist and, on first encounter, found myself racing out of the Drill Hall Gallery only to return later for a more leisurely engagement.

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There is a huge diversity in the exhibition of styles, techniques and conceptual approaches from gutsy gestural abstraction, almost cathartic in its nature, through to a cool analytical approach that is preoccupied with sequence, seriality and the passage of time. There is also a sort of memento mori installation, where an old-fashioned phone answering machine plays back recordings of the news of deaths and funerals, while photographs of the deceased appear like a line-up of those who have perished in the AIDS pandemic. Most of the exhibits are untitled.

As tempting as it may be to adopt some sort of quasi-psychoanalytical approach and to apply it to an artist whom I personally do not know, a more fruitful path may be to look at two of the artists identified by Maloney himself as being key to his formation as an artist – Sansom and Maddock. The recent retrospective of Sansoms art at the National Gallery of Victoria presented him as a brilliant and provocative creator who drew on the work of such artists as Francis Bacon, as well as on personal experiences, to present beautifully crafted autobiographic works of stunning power.

Maloney also has a well-equipped toolbox of art techniques and art passions that include Willem de Kooning, Mark Tobey, Andy Warhol, Edvard Munch and Hans Bellmer. These he employs to explore and at times exorcise personal demons, as well as express anxieties and homoerotic joys. These are not tentative drawings asking for permission to be born, but have urgency, passion and intensity. They are impatient drawings, at times possessing an explosive energy. Apart from the darkness, many of the pieces possess a sense of humour, sometimes quite obvious, on other occasions somewhat concealed and subversive.

The late Bea Maddock was a great cerebral master. With infinite patience, she could squeeze out every possible level of meaning within an artwork that quite often was appropriated from a photographic still sourced in the popular media. Maloney found in Maddock photographic techniques and the permission he needed to engage with images within this process of intellectual distillation.

Some of the most memorable works in this exhibition trace the process of cerebral distillation and the juxtaposition of photographic and drawn images sometimes accompanied by snippets of text. As with Maddock, some of these are deliberately esoteric images, where many meanings appear encoded and inaccessible to the casual glance.

Throughout the exhibition, there is a performance aspect in much of Maloneys work, as he absorbs the world, passions and circumstances that surround him and then employs his body to give expression to these experiences in visual form.

The artist Lindy Lee, a close friend of Maloney from his Sydney days, expresses it beautifully when she writes, “Peters own body was the vehicle through which he accessed the greater body of the world – a world made of invisible and unfathomable forces that align together in order to create life.”

This is a complex and multilayered exhibition that reflects the private life and thoughts of a creative individual. I have the feeling that many of these works were never intended for public display, possessing the candour, intimacy and innocence of thoughts confided to paper, like a private diary, but now unexpectedly exposed to the full light of day on a gallery wall.

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