Solo exhibition at Blockprojects Gallery, Melbourne

My solo exhibition in Melbourne, World not world, will consist of a suite of new paintings and drawings. The new Blockprojects space is large and open; I look forward to seeing the new works set out in this exciting new location.

Here's the catalogue essay by Steve Cox:

Caspar Fairhalls’s latest body of work extends his interest in presenting the effects of time upon objects, and the possibilities of a still image to convey that sensation. The intriguing images are set out in a series of visual paradoxes, and sometimes contain contradictory spatial logic.

Ruptured architectonic chunks - whose scale, in real terms, is impossible to gauge - seemingly float enigmatically in a void. Intersecting cuboid forms – sometimes in 3-dimensions, sometimes flattened as if drawn on a plan – fold in on themselves or are conjoined. Rounded, striped ‘retro’-forms also float out of a void, at once familiar, yet deeply unknowable. Organic forms intersect with geometric forms.

Fairhall delights in tweaking pictorial logic and spatial precepts – here, abiding by perspectival rules or, there, consciously working against them, as in his painting ‘Disc’, 2018, in which a carmen disc hovers both behind and in front of an impossible rhomboid frame, which twists, visually, before our eyes. Similarly, in ‘Triple Space’, 2019, various translucent cubes are set out, each appearing to float, or to dissolve against one another, suggesting multiple spatial situations, which cancel each other out, even as we acknowledge them.

The artist states that he is “very conscious of how we’re situated in deep time, and the significance of the Anthropocene.” And everywhere in the exhibition we are presented oblique references to the connection between the human-constructed world and the ever-eroding geological structures that support life.