After Arcadia: Limerence, Landscape and Chaos

CATALOGUE ESSAY

By Sean Kelly, 2021

Caroline Rannersberger is not entirely comfortable with the term landscape and perhaps this is not an appropriate term to describe her work. The term is loaded with the history of specific images which carry a cargo of cultural baggage, stylistic devices and political implications – none of which apply to her paintings.

Her work is actually about place, about time, and the sensate engagement with the various peculiar qualities of Land/Environment. It is an intensely personal evocation of the nature, character and structure of environments. These paintings can be responded to as formal constructions which contain the structural elements of place within an evocation of the essential character which defines it. Central to the apprehension of this ‘character’ are the subtle dynamics of light and atmosphere and of course the seriality of the works.

Rannersberger states that she works mostly within multiples and seriality because her view onto the land is ‘continuous’, (as it in fact always is). This approach presents the viewer with ‘place, space and sensation’ as a shifting, developing, and never fully resolved situation. The Tasmanian environment, and the view from her home on Bruny island, is always shifting due to constantly changing atmospherics and it is this dynamism which Rannersberger presents us with. These works are not depictions, they are Equivalents, more true than the literal truth, for they are true to experience, not recipe or theory.

So, these are not artworks to be ‘read’, as much as experienced, and as such they merely require a willing submission to an engagement with their material presence.

As Susan Sontag reminds us: In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. 1 Nonetheless we can discuss structure and method without leaching out the real nature of these paintings. The ‘Fold’ is a constantly recurring structural element in Rannersberger’s work, and it serves here as a mechanism to deal with this muscular environment of overlapping and inter-cutting planes of landforms and bays in a formal, almost cinematic manner. She states – ‘I view the fold as a feature of painting both literally, as in the folds of mountains, or draped cloth, and philosophically, as a manifestation of spirit and soul’

Rannersberger’s position in the production of the work is to ‘disengage from self-consciousness’, to be no longer at the ‘centre’ so that within the underlying formal structure the exploration of the properties of the material can develop in an organic, intuitive process, still drawing on what she calls the ‘observational memory bank’. The paintings inhabit two worlds, they refer to specific places and they powerfully and directly evoke the nature of those places and simultaneously exist as independent formal entities. The artwork is essentially more about where it goes than where it starts, As Gary Furnell writes -

When the practice of art is directed to the perfection of the work itself, its integrity as an autonomous object-good in itself- is thereby honoured. The appeal of great art is this peculiar, perfected autonomy. 2

Footnotes:

1. Susan Sontag - Against Interpretation
2. Gary Furnell – The False Path of Activism in Art

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Through a geophilosophical awareness of the landscape Tasmanian artist Caroline Rannersberger's work seeks to encapsulate the ever evolving shifts inherent within notions of place. Via a series of large scale, highly textured paintings her latest body of work is a meditation on chaos, both geological and human, and the altered states that arise from an unrequited and somewhat turbulent relationship with the land.

After Arcadia: Limerence, Landscape and Chaos Artist Statement

"I realize the Arcadian beauty I have long found myself in is fleeting. I am crushed by the ease with which my freedom to roam to the land is squashed by the unrelenting punishment of a global pandemic. Locked away from the liberty to range the mountains and oceans, I sense an unrequited love affair with the land in which I constantly seek to walk on the wild side of chaos. I begin a process of scratching, of tearing, of erasing; of recomposing landscape into art. In my painting practice it is important that the work reflects this element of chaos. It is as if the land resists containment and is still shifting and moving and evolving, evading possession but yielding ineffable beauty, which I inevitably attempt to capture on canvas.

Indeed, many artists have engaged with chaos. Francis Bacon saw chaos as a means to unlock sensation. Paul Klee saw a grey vanishing point that would leap over itself to resolve a painting.  I see chaos as the yearning to experience the sensation within the void, the horizon far beyond line of sight, a looming storm, the syrup of fog shrouding the water, the mountain peaks.  

This is a space of never-ending chaos that presents in my work as a kind of limerence; a fusion of altered states arising from an unrequited and somewhat chaotic relationship with the land. My art processes however are not simply chaotic, but rather a composition of chaos conveyed as movement in the land. To do this I create repeatedly layered forms and striations lacerated into the thick impasto paint or heavily glazed surfaces. I want to convey the sensation of the rock fissures on the shore line, like frozen rivers of lava cascading and shattering along their journey; or valleys and mountains erupting out of the river, withstanding millennia of gale force winds; or violent storms and fires; or the gentle rhythm of water as the wind gusts across and folds itself into the undulating surface of repeated wave motion. And as I turn, with every movement and observation the land appears to shift, almost imperceptibly.

The world of the painter does not begin or end, but is in a constant state of change or difference as it passes through chaos. Arcadia is but a fleeting notion, glimpsed momentarily. As Gilles Deleuze has observed, “Painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap that leads them from chaos to composition” Art indeed struggles with chaos, but it does so in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates for an instant, a sensation. Art begins when chaos is composed."

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Rannersberger is the Creative Director of the BRUNY20 Fellowship for the Arts, having held the position of Curator and Project Manager of the BRUNY18 Art Prize and BRUNY17 Art Prize. In 2017 she was appointed to the Australia Council’s Pool of Peers Assessment Panel and in 2016 she curated Bruny Island: EDGE2 Isthmus as a part of MONA’s MOFO Festival in Hobart. In 2014 Rannersberger was curated into Hazelhurst Regional Gallery’s exhibition Sublime Point: The Landscape in Painting, which featured 25 leading painters from across the country, each exploring ideas of self and responding to historical aspects of landscape and their relationship with nature.

She has been a finalist in the Glover Prize (2016, 2013, 2011), and the Blake Prize Director's Cut (2016),  the Mosman Art Prize (2015), the Bay of Fires Art Award (2014), Hutchins Prize (2013), the Tattersalls Art Prize (2012), the City of Albany Art Prize (2011), the TogArt Contemporary Art Award, NT (2011), the Fleurieu Art Prize, the ABN Amro Award, Fremantle Print Award and the Alice Prize. She has undertaken many significant commissions for public and private institutions including th City of Hobart, Illawarra Primary School, Kingborough Health Centre via Arts Tasmania, Zinfra Pty Ltd, City of Darwin Public Art Installation for Celebrating Darwin, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Research Foundation, Cancer and Bowel Research Trust Association and SA Ambulance. Her work is held in prominent public collections including the RACT (Royal Automobile Club Tasmania), Price Waterhouse Cooper, The National Gallery of Australia, The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), and Artbank.