Fred Cress paintings 1988 to 1995.
A Balance of Power, The battle of Line and Colour and the sex war.

The Figurative paintings of Fred Cress, have the appearance a battle field for competing interests and yet they contrive to form stable monumental structures.  This formal aesthetic battle could be seen as a suitable method for communicating the bizarre social dysfunctions Cress depicts.

Yves Klein saw the history of art as a battle between line and colour, Delacroix versus Ingres, Yves Klein versus Mathieu.  Klein’s argument is based on a classic opposition in painting where drawing limits the phenomenological presence of colour.  For example, Ingres emphasised linear rhythm  and contained form at the expense of atmosphere and the effects of broken colour.  Cress, however, wants to have the best of both worlds.
“Colour shows sensitivity, line shows intelligence” Fred  
Cress in interview with the author. 17/2/95.
This desire to hold oppositions in controlled balance is what gives Fred Cress’s paintings their awkward energy.  Figuration and abstraction, movement and stability, surface and depth, narrative and unity, accident and control are all straining within the artist’s obsessively manipulated compositions.

The paintings in this exhibition are boldly narrative.  For an artist of Cress’s generation of abstract painters, narrative has been virtually excluded from the vocabulary yet he embraces it in these works while still claiming a modernist heritage.  The root of this apparent paradox may lie in Cress’s English background.  The English have had a sporadic and half hearted committment to modernism.  After each World War, artists who had previously ventured into abstraction and constructivism, retreated to various forms of romantic figuration and the comfort of rural landscape.
There are several English figurative artists who stand out from this faint hearted advance and retreat.  They may be seen as eccentric but they may be the only great artists Britain has produced in modern times.  Stanley Spencer, Edward Burra, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and John Bellany are amongst the best of these. 
As a young man Cress was fascinated by the Stanley Spencer      Resurrection which hung over the stair well at The Tate.  He loved it  for its complexity of form and for the movement that seethed across the entire surface of the picture, it is possible to see the same quality in Cress’s recent work.  He enjoyed  Francis Bacon
“...because he represented a continuing belief in the grand manner.” Interview with the Author 20/4/95.
Kitaj was another favourite.
“I liked Kitaj because he swam against the current.  He kept open the possibility for narrative and personal content.“  Interview with Author , 20/4/95.
Cress’s own painting of the time such as Woman at Sink, 1958 would have hung comfortably at the Beaux Art Gallery in London where Bratby, Auerbach and Kossoff showed “kitchen sink” paintings in the 1950s.  When he came to Australia in 1962 he was already a practising artist of The British School.

Cress engaged with a spirit of enthusiasm for new art that prevailed amongst the young artists he met here.   In 1965-1966 he travelled to Europe and America at a time when Pop art and colour field painting were dominating exhibitions in all the major galleries.  This experience confirmed a tendency which had already appeared in his work of merging abstract and figurative styles.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s Cress worked on a series which combined abstract motifs with box like structures or enclosures.

In 1974 Cress spent an extended period of time in New York as a recipient of a Visual Arts Board residency.  Thanks to Patrick Mc Caughey he was introduced to Clement Greenberg and consequently to the generation of painters surrounding him such as,  Ken Noland, Larry Poons, Jules Olitski.  The influence of this movement was already apparent in Cress’s paintings of the early 1970s, and became more dominant after this trip.   None the less, Cress now claims,
“Even in New York I knew something was wrong.  The painting that Greenberg supported  reduced the possibility for great painting.”  Interview with the Author 20/4/95.

It would be possible to claim that an element of figure was sustained in Cress’s painting throughout his abstract period.  The diagonal brush strokes of the late 1970s and the subsequent return to architectural or box structures  each contained within them an element of the human presence.  In 1979 Mc Caughey told Cress that the paintings had a portrait like intensity, this remark impressed Cress and led to his trying some self portraits in 1981.  A series of drawings in 1981 - 1982 were based on the painting, The Guitar Lesson, by Balthus.  Balthus appealed to Cress,
“...because of the implied narrative and the sexual overtones of secrecy and the forbidden..” Interview with the author 20/4/95.
The subsequent 1980s paintings edge closer and closer to figuration, furniture and interior spaces and even fairly well developed landscape images are glimpsed through apertures playing with complex spaces which often suggest a game of hide and seek.  Dark enclosed areas seem to be inhabited and items of clothing allude to secretive activities in the hidden spaces of the painting.  Like the erotic Japanese screen Whose sleeves? in which the abandoned Kimono implies seductive actions off stage. 

In 1988 Cress finally emerges as a narrative painter.  It is almost as if the games he has played were about concealing his real desire to paint the figure, His method of painting still involves screening and hiding.  This figurative impulse could still be his guilty secret because he still claims to be an abstract painter, freed from the conventions of pictorial space demanded by traditional figurative painting.  He justifies this in terms of his methodology.  Like Leonardo da Vinci and Francis Bacon, he recommends accident as a source of inspiration, but in his case he has taken chance into a highly determined process which he calls his unique system.
“Because of the system I have invented, I am free to create the picture, whereas when I was first seeking figuration I ran into the conventional restrictions of spatial illusion etc..   Incidentally I am not only a freer artist because of it ,  I am also a more complete painter.”  Interview with the Author 20/4/95.

Revelation in the form of mimesis is in reality often an act of disguise.  The orchid that seduces a wasp into copulation to complete its own reproductive cycle does so through mimesis of the sexual organs yet its function is not revelation but deceit.  The explicit sexuality of Duchamp’s series of projects, from The Bride to Etant Donnees,  has often struck me as an elaborate concealment under the guise of revelation.  Cress’s paintings seem to have this same quality.  This is not the place for a psychoanalysis of Fred Cress but as we consider his images and his system it may be interesting to keep this subjective reading in the background.

In recent years Cress has chosen to divide his time between rural France and Sydney.  Living in Europe he has turned to historical European masters for inspiration and pays little attention to contemporary art.  The Northern tradition is of particular interest, he enjoys Breugel’s busy scenes of daily life and was particularly taken by Rembrandt’s Night Watch with its secret spaces and dramatic patches of light, ( partly a result of ageing ).  He also enjoys the Symbolists and Romantic painters such as Fussli and Bocklin and French narrative paintings by David and Ingres.  Unlike all of these artists however he uses light and shade, colour and texture for abstract purposes, they are nothing to do with figurative composition.  Rembrandt used impasto and light and shade to bring objects forward, tactility and high contrast were both considered to appear closer to the viewer and were used to achieve solidity.  Cress by contrast uses these elements to create a surface skin which produces a kind of veil through which the viewer sees the figurative tableaux.  The veils consist of a dispersion across the surface of the textural drawing so that it falls as much outside the figurative form as it does within it.  There are also successive layers of transparent colour which are largely accidental in their effect.

“I decided early on that I never wanted to become bored to death with my painting, I wanted to find a technique which would be full of accident and incident, but I wanted to avoid the problem of earlier marks contradicting the finished structure, that is why I always start with rigorous drawings.”  Interview with the author 20/4/95.

The compositions are started as charcoal drawings.  These are often worked over and over till Cress is satisfied with the skeleton of the composition.  These drawings are quite finely drawn but are then subjected to an applied wash which smudges and diffuses the linear structures. This process helps to develop the play of light and dark, not as representational structure but as abstract effect.  The next stage is to build up layers of black and white in certain patches across the surface.  Cress claims that it takes many applications before they become white enough, this is a reference to Mondrian who used to go over his lines again and again till they achieved the required density.  “The future energy lies in this underpainting.”  Next he mixes up bucket loads of transparent colour, this is poured over the canvas while it is laid on the floor.  He sweeps the colour about using a piece of board so that it sets up all kinds of accidental effects.  The liquid paint collects in the textured surface obliterating some effects and highlighting others.  This process may be repeated four or five times until Cress feels that he has achieved the mood he wants. 

When these accidental layers are dry he often goes back to the black and white stage and draws it all up again without cancelling out the original structures.  The whole process of surprise and control may be repeated several times, he then brings the work to a conclusion with a few finishing touches.  This system of alternating firm control with surprise effects can be traced back to the abstract works of the seventies when for example he would lay in a soft field like Olitsky and then paint in a broad diagonal gesture.  This mark would then be subjected to a series of veiling layers and each time repainted.  Revelation and concealment sequentially producing a blurring of the present gesture and insinuating a temporal reading, in a sense this reading strikes at the very heart of Greenbergian abstraction which was to have been unambiguously in the here and now.

The compositions consist of figurative scenarios which are full of bizarre incident and grotesque satires on social life.  Goya comes to mind with his parodies of court life and perhaps Hogarth ‘s scenes of both polite and common life in Regency England.  the earliest of these paintings come around the time when Cress’s marriage was breaking up and the artist ‘s imagination was filled with doubt and suspicion.  Titles such as Tell Tales and Murmurs  speak of his anxiety.  Cress may be secretive but he is also gregarious, he leads a very active social life.  In 1988 he began painting group compositions of dinner parties and incidents at social gatherings.   A friend is depicted whispering in his wife’s ear, laying fertile seeds of doubt about his fidelity.  People gossip malevolently behind his back.  The world he depicts comes from our worst expectations of a bitchy art world, raised to the pitch of monstrosity.
The theme of social eating evolves into strange groupings where women lead infantile men around on leashes , dog fights break out among the transfigured participants and the whole becomes enmeshed in a swirling thread of ribbon. 
“The ribbon goes back a long way and was originally evolved from the crown of thorns on Christ’s head in the Isenheim altar piece.”  Interview with the author 20/4/95.
Can this reference be purely formal or does Cress want us to identify the unravelling of Christ’s crown with his own feelings of persecution?  The technique he has adopted is certainly obsessive and while it can be accounted for in formal terms, the metaphor of veiling in the multiple layers of transparent poured paint is undoubtedly a reference to skin.  If we accept Bataille’s theory that all painting is a form of self portraiture, the repeated reworking of this surface can also be seen as a kind of scarification or self flagellation, this would support the paranoid fantasies he depicts.