PETER BOOTH

Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne (label on reverse)
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 2006

Peter Booth 2006, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 6 - 29 July 2006, cat. 6

Jeff Makin, 'Critics Choice: Peter Booth', Herald Sun, 17 July 2006, p. 91

This work is not framed. It has the original stretcher and is not lined. Overall excellent original condition.
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Peter Booth's is an art of terrible beauty, an art of grim visions exquisitely rendered, of bleak apocalypse underlaid with a deep humanist faith. Beginning as a rigorous and stately abstractionist in the 1970s, for the past thirty years Booth has beguiled and lacerated the Australian art world with his intense and intensely personal brand of figurative expressionism, a world of black nights and grey days, of burning books and burning cities, of empty, snow-strewn forests and plains and roads, of demons, mutants and cannibals, of dogs and bugs, of watchers and waiters, perpetrators and victims.

In this iconography there are echoes of other artists in the western tradition whose works deals with the bizarre, the uncanny, the carnivalesque or the simply horrific: Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breugel the elder, Francisco Goya, William Blake, James Ensor, Edvard Munch, Otto Dix, Arthur Boyd, Philip Guston, Leon Golub.¹ But there are also images derived from dreams, horror movies, television news, epileptic visions, and above all a rich, powerful and dynamic pictorial and narrative imagination.² The particular 'meanings' of individual works are never made clear, at least not by the artist. Booth's famous reticence, and his steadfast refusal to title his pictures, forces each viewer to face his or her own response, to confront his or her own uncertainties – and not just about the art, but about the very nature of the human condition.

Consider the equivocal nature of the present work, the various possibilities of interpretation it presents. Perhaps the image comes from the traditional Christian iconography of the Man of Sorrows wearing the Crown of Thorns. Perhaps it was inspired by the picture of Pinhead, the sado-masochistic leader of the Cenobites in Clive Barker's classic 1987 horror flick Hellraiser (and its seven sequels). Perhaps it signifies the pain of thought, or just a headache. The nail man's bindings are similarly ambiguous. They could be an image of comfort: an infant's swaddling cloth, a healing bandage or an exhausted athlete's dressing gown. Conversely, they could be strangling and deathly: a madman's straitjacket, the enfolding tentacles of some nasty marine creature or alien, or the burial wrappings of an ancient mummy-zombie. They also link the work to the artist's fascination with the world of insects and crustaceans, suggesting some kind of chrysalis or cocoon from which a multi-antennaed nymph-man is emerging.³

Although first exhibited in 2006, the work was completed four years previously, and led to at least one other 'nailhead' painting: Painting 2004 (Head with nails). Of the latter work, Sydney Morning Herald critic John McDonald wrote: 'Although nothing could be more grotesque than this head, lying flat on the ground, staring sightlessly into a jet-black sky, the work is such a virtuoso piece of painting that one could almost forget the subject matter while studying the flecks of silver, grey, red and flesh-tone, piled on with a busy palette knife... This may sound dilettantish, but it is the reason Booth's collectors will purchase even the most gruesome pictures. His figures may be ugly, but they are always beautifully painted.'⁴

Painting 2004 is a 'slow' painting by one of Australia's late modern masters. Its dark, mysterious and uncompromising image and its rich, thick and delicately-manipulated pigment will continue to deliver strange aesthetic pleasure over a long time.

1. For an exploration of such resonances, see Peter Timms, Getting to know Mr Booth, Australian Exhibitions Touring Agency/Riddoch Art Gallery, Mt Gambier, 1989
2.  For Booth's imagery, see Robert Lindsay, 'Hard Rain: the iconography of Peter Booth', in Jason Smith (ed.), Peter Booth: Human/Nature, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 17 - 24
3.  See Painting 1998, private collection, in Smith, op. cit., cat. 75
4.  John McDonald, 'Opposites impact', Sydney Morning Herald (Spectrum: Visual Arts), July 9 - 10, p. 28