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Richard Mongiat Artist Statement New Paintings These paintings happened in a funny way... I went to the Varley Museum to see an exhibition of work by the Painters Eleven. They were all the rage around the time that I was born. Like the fins on a '59 Chrysler, they were the future. And then they kind of disappeared. Or maybe it was that promise of the modern world that seemed to vanish. After the show, I returned home to paint. The paintings in my exhibition straddle an area between representation and abstraction. Unlike representation, they begin their lives as a series of completely random markings made from brush loads of left over paint from prior works. Yet as they evolve, they seem to suggest a figure/ground relationship. Unlike abstraction, a narrative becomes implied. Like the "new kid in the school yard", the paintings are inhabited by strange figures trying to adapt to the new world that they find themselves in. These paintings want to move. Their rhythm is that of theAM radio. They shake and jiggle and they can't keep their legs still. They chug and clank like the trains on the railway tracks of my youth. They spin quietly like the inner workings of a wrist watch. They're Professor Longhair and Hank Williams talkin' bout the latest Beach Boys record. They are the colour of billboards, shopping bags and old factories. They are the colour of pop cans and plastic shoes. Floating on the surface are the leftover bits of shapes, carved out by my brush - like pop ups on a computer screen, like the flotsam and jetsam of old sputniks and appolos coursing through space. They're constantly squabbling. The ordered and the messy jostling for supremacy. These paintings are like siblings stuck in the back seat on a long summer drive: They draw invisible lines, defining impervious boundaries between each other, broached easily by wandering fingers. These paintings are about my childhood and that adult yearning to taste the sweet gummy bears of nostalgia for a time that no longer exists. These paintings are about the past, smeared with a patina of the present, trying to recreate that same feeling of promise for a utopian future. Richard Mongiat, 2005
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