Looking West – Catalogue Essay by Sarah Jones 2025
Breen unwraps and carefully hangs a painting on the studio wall. The room lights up, as if he has drawn a blind that I’d missed upon entry. I reorient myself. Out of the window to my right is the grapefruit tree I’d walked past, laden with fruit, gratefully soaking in the midmorning sun. But ahead of me now, the golden light has dropped in the sky—it pierces a mass of late afternoon clouds, silvering the crests of breaking waves that crash on the beach that has appeared below. Breen and I stand, suspended between two windows at two times of day, watching the sea storm the sand one hundred kilometres from the coast.
These are undoubtably a master’s works. The kind of paintings that smell of salt, that break silences, rhythmically crashing with their coming tides. Paintings that can send a soft cool change over the skin as the warmth fades at the close of day. Their immersive demand fulfills the desire to inhabit the scene. I find myself asking about the exact location of each meticulous work. This is not the kind of question that I would usually ask a painter, perhaps relying instead on a vague sense of a place, the comfort of my own recognition like a blurred reflection. But I ask it of Breen repeatedly. There is nothing vague or washed by memory here. These paintings dance more closely with the sublime than the romantic. They are a series of film stills as potentially treacherous as they are exquisite. It is a jouissance not a joy.
As the artist opens the impossible sea-facing window over and over again, I am unable to fight the urge to stand, in my mind’s eye, where he has stood. Fixing myself on the edge of each canvas, I watch the sun rise and set over the surf somewhere between a perfect painting and my imperfect imagination. I demand the painter’s location as an anchor for my own; I use the subtleties of the shifts in light to pinpoint a time of day; I search the shadows for direction. Lost, I am struck by the artist’s presence in paintings from which he is wholly absent.
The poet-paradox1 describes the necessity for the lyric poet to lose consciousness of the self in an act of self-expression. This state of hyperconsciousness sets subterranean forces to rising like groundwater, and the swelling of the subconscious breaks over the shore/sure of the conscious mind. Desires, dream-wishes, parallel states rise into reality through this poetic practice. In paintings so perfectly refined, so filmic, so real, the dislocation of unreality is profound. Lyrical even.
Breen’s works have delighted us for almost 30 years. His epitomic capture of our most familiar streets, our rolling rural landscapes, and our coastlines is nothing short of iconic. This series takes us beyond the familiar, to a deeper kind of familiar in which we are consciously lost. I walk past a much smaller, rougher ocean silhouette on the wall near the door on my way out. I gesture to it, acknowledging Breen’s return to the sea. He jokes that it is one of his earliest paintings, that perhaps he has returned to it, that perhaps we spend our whole lives looking for the same thing. I wonder if whatever that thing is, it’s out west.
[1] This is my rather light and ‘poetic’ interpretation of Grant Caldwell’s detailed and complex thesis on Hyperconsciousness in which he proposes the “poet-paradox” in: Caldwell, Grant., Intention and Unintention or the Hyperconscious in Contemporary Lyric Impulse, Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty, Limited. 2018.
