An Appreciation by Roger MacDonald - Author (Mr. Darwin's Shooter)
There is something wonderful about Andrew Antoniou's pictures that never wears out for me. Paintings I have lived with for years are as alive to me now as when I first saw them. A curtain seems newly raised on a sequence of intense dramatic action. Either something momentous is about to happen, or something momentous has recently happened and is forever being lived out in the fullness of life.
Look at these pictures in the morning, they have the rippling quality of a dream. Look at the same pictures after the day is over and they give mature meaning to waking reality. Our lives, after all, conform to a pattern, the shape of myth and story.
Don't be deceived by the jaunty costumes, the jester's masks, the player's ability to weave a gold crown from discarded wrappings. This is very much the world we live in, informed by a humane vision where hope survives desperation, tenderness encircles cruelty, and growth and renewal are hailed in small green shoots and through the praise of music and making things.
A quite marvellous double dimension of hope and despair is achieved somewhat mysteriously by this artist and master-craftsman who makes a cameo appearance, if you know where to look for him, stage-managing the action wearing a colander for a helmet, a pair of outsized goggles, a knapsack spray on his back, carrying a dead bird on a stake, and lurching through a possibly war-torn landscape. That a great sense of humour hovers around the darkest suggestions in these pictures is one of their triumphs. Even the darkest of them, set in a torturer's chamber, borrows its stage props from melodramatic gesture (the cow's skull, the dangling hook, the dressmaker's dummy) and so derides the moral horror of the procedure, with a sort of courage.
Here is a world where a party whistle brings a dead man to life. Here a dead dog wears angel wings. Now a man dances with boots on his hands. Now an aviator leans from his plane and grabs a spiky star. Over there a sheep looks almost glad to be cleavered, or at least in bliss. The lamplighter, the bell-ringer, the waiter (with a saucepan on his head), being representives of old crafts, join forces with the artist in the service of the here and now.
For the people in these pictures are always in the act of movement, reaching out, propelled towards, and through, and against each other. That they are somehow playing a role only clarifies their intense relevance to a core of action as they deal with the elementals - bread, soil, water, fire. They have physical appetities and emotions - their mental states being as present to the eye as the three-dimensional weight of their strong, classically rounded bodies. Dolefulness, ruminativeness, cruelty and curiosity can be felt; lust, avarice, and tenderness - sexual longing too, hanging around like a threat and a consolation. While they look on with a thick hypnotic concentration, they listen with longing and alarm.
What happens next in this dance of heightened ordinariness, called life? And who are they, really, are they gods or men? Wonderfully, they might also be asking this question of themselves, as we ask it of them, as the barriers dissolve between art and life, most artfully.