Closer To Home

Catalogue essay by Elli Walsh 2019

The expressionistic paintings of Waldemar Kolbusz create a spirited space where abstraction mingles with figuration in vibrant chromatic constellations. In the Perth-based artist’s new series, ‘Closer to Home’, geometry and gesture converge in a symphony of colour, conjuring allusive scenes that dip in and out of recognition.

Kolbusz’s process traverses the untamed and spontaneous terrain of abstraction through to the more controlled territory of representation. His non-representational paintings are seeded from spontaneity, slowly transforming into something more resolved as agile brushstrokes forage for meaning across the canvas. There is a freneticism pulsing from Kolbusz’s visceral swathes and bleeding streams of oil, yet a quieter timbre also resounds from the dry meandering marks and gentle tonal gradients. Here the act of painting becomes a search for self as in the spirit of abstract expressionism, the works functioning as internal landscapes marked by vast topographical texture and psychological nuance.

Kolbusz’s representational paintings, on the other hand, begin from what is controlled and considered before allowing the expressive to colonise the canvas. These effervescent works signal a shift in his output, responding to a self-proclaimed ‘mid-career art/life crisis’ where Kolbusz questions his place, contemplating challenges of relevance, reinvention and worth. Created from photographs taken on his many travels, the paintings capture moments where, in the artist’s own words, ‘something has clicked about my practice, welding that physical place to a moment of clarity’. The ambling brittle lines buttressing bold, jewel-hued forms in Cover (2019) visualise the opposition and balance, contractions and confluence, steeping human consciousness. There is the intimation of trees in the barky vertical lines, the semblance of a disappearing road and the dizzying flicker of red traffic lights as Kolbusz reminisces about walking the long boulevards in Buenos Aires, exhausted, seeking inspiration; enlightenment. And yet nothing here is definitive – the painting can equally be read as an aerial landscape, rivers etching the landscape like veins through a patchwork of foliage and rocky forms.

Other works are more socially engaged, playing with the constructs and confines of contemporary culture. After hours (2018) self-reflexively engages with the world of art, where a resort pool after hours in Alice Springs, sad and still, symbolises the superficiality and celebrity of art fairs – their shiny veneers filling in for a transparent ideological void. While this painting is without figuration, there is the hint of habitation as deck chairs sit expectantly, waiting for the world to wake. Despite this critical hue and creep of cynicism, the paintings are celebrations of thinking and making. ‘I’m looking for honesty’, admits Kolbusz. And while these figurative works may depict actual places, he presents them as borderless spaces for the viewer to weave their own narrative.

There is a visual overlap consciously at play in Kolbusz’s paintings, as the non-representational is imbued with narrative and the figurative celebrate abstraction. For the artist, his two approaches analogise the dualities of life: ‘The degree to which we are all challenged in our daily lives between order and mess, control and spontaneity, the big picture and small detail, draws me in.’

I am painting the moment when a part of my life becomes more understandable, less entangled or messy, perhaps more beautiful. 

Perth based artist Waldemar Kolbusz creates non-representational paintings that resound with vibrant colour and pulsate with a particular form of abstract energy. Utilising the varied textural and aesthetic possibilities available in his chosen medium of oil paint, such as dribbling lines, hard edges, visible brushstrokes and the occasional presence of aerosol spray techniques, Kolbusz allows his compositions to develop from his intuitive engagement with the act of painting itself.  Through his gestural mark-making and energetic application of paint, Waldemar Kolbusz generates an expressive sense of immediacy in his work. The resulting paintings resonate with vibrant colour and an organic sense of aesthetic balance.

For this latest exhibiton, Kolbusz brings elements of the figurative into his work to create evocative pieces where colour, form, the abstract and the familiar collide.

Kolbusz creates deeply expressionistic works that penetrate a sense of place, time and space to evoke a feeling and provoke in his audience an involved and sincere response. It is this inimitable clarity and pureness of expression that sets apart his decidedly sophisticated body of work. Fiona Kalaf  (Chairperson, Board of the Art Gallery of Western Australia)