Inner Lives
Christopher Croft, born in Melbourne in 1947, has been living and
working in Paris for the past four years after having resided in Germany,
Italy and New Zealand.
Christopher Croft is considered to be one of the most visible representatives
of contemporary Australian art in the way he combines surreal inspiration,
inherited from Magritte and Duchamp, with a selection of humoristic
settings found across modern civilization.
It is in the series of large works presented in this exhibition that
this feeling toward the world is seen best: playing with the effects
of twists and surprises, Christopher Croft creates scenes in which for
example, ornithologists sit in a room observing birds which are stuffed
but seem to be more alive than the observers themselves. The same humour
is to be found in a matching picture, where three researchers hop in
front of an audience of frogs. One finds it also in the series of works
devoted to the theme 'museums' where Christopher Croft helps us discover
what goes on behind the scenes: storage areas for the people within
the paintings, for fantastic characters and incongruous objects.
Christopher Croft never ceases his dialogue with the works of the
great masters, the very canonical forms and traditional materials of
the great western painters that he returns to and re-works, questioning
the relationships central to him in art between space, objects, and
living beings. We see this in the extremely beautiful series of portraits
of men and women 'in the mirror' where the artist has set himself up
behind a mirror which shows no hint of its own silvering. Further evidence
of this dialogue is seen in the series of seven small oils on wooden
panels which have been prepared using a gesso recipe from the fifteenth
century. The ornamental background of these delicately painted works
is inspired by the Japanese applied art of Chiyogami, a type of traditional
decorative paper originally hand-printed by the woodblock process. As
if paying homage to the artisans the subjects of these paintings are
intensely involved in the practical details of their work. The observer
cannot help but be drawn into their quiet and concentrated world.
Although there is a certain sense of confrontation in Christopher
Croft's work, the paintings are never violent: the strangeness of the
universe that is constructed is depicted before all else with tenderness
and a slight melancholy. One can see this particularly in the smaller
canvasses which serve to counter-act the larger ones: touching portraits
of men and women who bounce around playing, or of a dancing clown-like
figure - in a style at once both burlesque and poetic.
The exhibition Inner Lives is an occasion to discover the work of
Christopher Croft in all its richness and diversity.
Christian Leroy, Paris 2002
"...These issues were wittily raised by Christopher Croft in
a recent exhibition at the Jensen Gallery. Taking as his subject the
'de-museumification' of the Buckle Street building, Croft asks some
stimulating questions about how museums work, and the way in which they
establish authority and coherence. In Croft's paintings, the fragments
of culture sit revealed as meaningless, a jumble of objects that, when
separated from the narratives of naming and classifying taken on by
the museum, fail to cohere into smooth representations of the world.
Croft successfully reveals that it is not objects that make a museum
authorative and authentic, but the 'magic' of the curator and exhibition
designer. As the tricks of display are revealed as illusions, as we
see behind the scenes of the museum, a totally different museum appears,
one in which collections remain heterogeneous groupings of objects that
do not attain the guise of historical truth.
'Man with Thesaurus' is a perfect example of the point Croft makes
in these paintings. A seated man and a skeleton are placed in the same
ambiguous space of a room in a museum. The thesaurus on his lap is the
key: the instrument of naming and therefore knowing, this image is a
play on the taxonomic work of the museum, in which an adequate representation
of the world is established through the act of classifying the objects
on display, and then relating them to one another. At this moment, without
the authorative voice of the museum to help us, the object (skeleton)
remains mute, one of many fragments in the collection of incoherent
oddities left when the belief in a museum's authority is lost. Croft's
most important contribution is to highlight the moment when the museum
becomes visible as an ideological apparatus, mediating the experience
of viewing culture. (...)"
Damian Skinner:
'Art New Zealand',
No 87 Winter 1998