Catalogue Essay by Elli Walsh 2020
William Breen’s tightly choreographed Victorian landscapes and streetscapes evince the existential architecture of place. With a hyper-real handling of composition and form, the artist captures quiet moments that feel at once palpably present and nostalgically half remembered. Breen’s new series of gouache paintings prompt us to consider the ontological currency of the built environment and its relationship to history and identity. An otherworldly lustre lands on the contours of his topographies, which are rendered with soft, indistinct edges as if buzzing with energy. This sense of kinesis – albeit in hyper slow motion – is hedged by an aura of stasis, solitude and silence. Fossilised by his observant brush, Breen’s streetscapes become relics of a receding past freighted with the lived narratives of generations. The artist’s skills of observation cast him as a contemporary flaneur. We see the streets through his eyes, with all the nuances of subjectivity trickling into each brushstroke. Light, space and symmetry converge as he engages with a traditional Western sensibility of landscape painting, employing single point perspective combined with receding structures to create illusions of depth. The artist disguises the footprints of his brush with a silken handling of gouache, partially smoothing the texture of the landscape to create a sense of dreaming, imagining or remembering. In their timelessness and utopian colour harmonies, Breen’s paintings possess a sense of Romantic urbanity, a paradoxical mundane sublimity, that draws out attention to the profound beauty in the banal. Capturing each vista with precision and sensitivity, the artist casts light – quite literally – on the bypassed, the forgotten and the ordinary. Sun drenched shopfronts, vacant roads and derelict walls take on new meaning in the shadow of the Covid lockdowns. In one painting, undressed mannequins standing in a shop window become proxies for people, basking awkwardly in the afternoon sun. These uncanny figures peer out at the empty street through their glass enclosures, speaking strongly yet silently of the isolation and entrapment endemic to our current moment. Though this sense of suspended animation – and, perhaps, desolation – is palpable, there are hints of habitation in Breen’s compositions. Noticing a freshly swept sidewalk, a parked bike, a ‘wet paint’ sign or even a spectral figure in a shop, we realise that these are the sequences caught at the crossroads of time, in between the transient energy of the past and the burgeoning flicker of the future. A melancholy peacefulness hangs in the air here, buffeted by a tone of anticipation for what’s to come. Constructing a metanarrative of sorts, Breen paints the paint of others – graffiti, street art, vandalism – sprayed an age ago by forgotten hands. Not only is the human impact on the natural environment tacitly suggested; but also the human impact on the built environment. Layers and layers of anthropogenic residue colonise these streets – strata of history plastered on the cracked walls, embalmed in the twentieth century facades, hinted at in derelict signage. These works are, ultimately, ethnographic time capsules, capturing the bypassed beauty that lingers deep within the aged walls of our collective present.
Flinders Lane Gallery first exhibited William Breen’s paintings in 2000. He has been a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial Prize, Tattersalls Art Prize, Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Brett Whiteley Scholarship, the Redlands Westpac Art Award, the Geelong Art Prize and the Nillumbik Art Prize, the Conrad Jupiter Art Prize, and the John Leslie Art Prize. Breen has been shortlisted for the prestigious Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale Art Prize.He is represented in corporate and private art collections in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom including the RACV Collection, Macquarie Bank, Bendigo Art Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Deakin University, Artbank, City of Perth, National Australia Bank, LaTrobe University Melbourne, Loyola College, Melbourne and the City of Whitehorse Collection.
