ANDREW SOUTHALL : the Art of an Outsider

ANDREW SOUTHALL .

‘You could never describe Andrew Southall as a ‘stylist’. Nor is he the darling of society or of curators ...... His art is never ‘pat’. Never slick. Unlike some of his contemporaries who hit onto a selling formula and just repeated it, Southall didn’t. It’s almost as if he looses patience with a painting after the initial idea is roughed in.

Early works that I remember reviewing back in the early 1980s, at that great gallery in Toorak called Realities were figurative. Still life predominated. Highly coloured chairs were scattered across a muscular picture-plane and delineated by squeezed-straight-from-the-tube oil paint. Perhaps if he had stuck with that he would have been a better known painter today. Instead he went to London.His work began to turn up in some of London’s leading galleries such as the Redfern Gallery in Cork St. Fischer Fine Art, and the Crane Kalman Gallery across the road from Harrods.

There was also the watershed Williamstown series spread over two galleries, a theme he shared with his friend, Rick Amor – Amor at Niagara and Southall at City Gallery. These paintings of the Western Port Bay and Williamstown were pivotal for both artists. While it clearly announced the primacy of regionalism for both, it saw Amor move deeper into an apocalyptic vision of urban decay around the bay, and Southall away from it. Southall’s view was slowly flattening, de-figuring, and moving towards an abstract minimalist composition.

Colour had always been Southall’s major vehicle of expression. To a certain extent it was usually contained, constrained, by representational delineation. In these latest works, it has broken through those boundaries and freely soars and follows its own organic feel. Large skeins of poured let-run colour, reds, yellows, oranges, converse with one-another. These are totally organic works that follow the flow of a viscous medium. Form is suggested by the process. Occasionally a line navigates its way across an intense chromatic field and is a link to earlier works. But now rather than representing some ‘thing’ outside itself the painting speaks only of itself.

As Giles Auty art critic of the Spectator noticed twenty years ago Southall is an existentialist painter. He experiences then he records. These latest works, in a sense, are pure emotion, a raw feeling unrestricted by pictorial conventions. And once again at a time of figurative revivals Southall is sailing against the wind.’

Jeff Makin

3rd February 2011