Richard Bell

Milani Gallery, Queensland

Private Collection

Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Old Aboriginal Sayings, December 1-22, 2018

In 2002 Richard Bell won the prestigious Telstra Aboriginal Art Award with his controversial painting Bell’s Theorem: Scientia e Metaphysica 2002 which boldly declared: Aboriginal Art, it’s a White Thing. The central point of the accompanying essay was to draw a distinction in the power relations between the producers of the art (Aboriginal people) and those who collect, curate and control it (almost exclusively white audiences). One of the central tenets of the essay was his assertion that Aboriginal artworks should be seen as equal to other forms of contemporary art, rather than as objects of anthropology. This painting, Aesthetic Equal Rights, is a direct statement about that specific desire for Aboriginal art and, by extension, Aboriginal people, to be treated equally. Within the haze of dots, the emergent text I SEE YOU AS MY EQUAL declares his position. It’s as if his ‘dot’ painting is declaring its self-dignity in whichever context it is displayed. The method of dot technique employed was developed in the early 2000s when he began to read assessments of Aboriginal painting as a new form of modernism with aesthetic resemblances to abstract expressionism. As a reaction, Bell began making dots in the method of action painting, declaring that the ’traditional’ dot technique was a form of slave labour demanded by the white controlled art-market. He named the technique, 'desperately seeking Emily’, in homage to the great indigenous painter Emily Kngwareye. The technique also recalls visually the Ishihara tests for colour blindness, where digits or figures are embedded in a picture composed of dots differentiated only by colour. Bell’s allusion to colour blindness imagines a world without racism.