"In a Roomful of Paintings & Elsewhere" - An Appreciation of Andrew Antoniou
by Roger MacDonald
There is a sense of arriving at a theatre late, to find the stage lit, the action urgent, the language pared back, the plot reduced to an almost primal act. The characters who come onto this stage have a feeling of being slightly out of time, wearing approximations of modern dress, as in re- staged Shakespearean fragments, or bits of dramatised Homer. intensity. They shout, implore, stare, and clutch at an essence of being. They enact fragments of classically conceived. Their actions suggest an Olympiad of the emotions.
All along there is a carnival going on. The figures in their pairs and groupings hardly ever look at each other directly, but fix their eyes on the spaces in between. They are people transfixed by their fate, but without intelligence of it. A one - person show, a bunch of props displayed, a voy age with four of five participants, a boat setting sail, an anchor dragged up a shore, the shore taken, a seedling planted, a star observed.
The style sings of hope, as Cyril Connolly noted of F. Scott Fitzgerald, with the message, while not despair, speaking of struggle and an instinct for journeying and none of the certainties of death in life
We might say that the men, women, children, dogs, birds, bulls, and reptiles are unlike any we know in the way they angle to each other, in the way their bodies tilt in relation to what they are doing. They have the passionate concentration of autism, they are engulfed in anguish, they are otherworldly in their longing, which is pure in its off centeredness, unrelieved by any diversion into ordinary existence. Or so it seems.
The shadow of life brings life back. There is happiness here, involvement, sensual pleasure and wonder. We are in the midst of life.
Ordinary existence is where they originate, these chunky staring individuals. They are like figures from Pompeii whose life is caught in a moment of apocalypse and joy. A flow of variously coloured lava has imprinted their emotions and sent them down through time in a fresh, ever - present instant.
It is something to be celebrated in Andrew Antoniou’s work that the characters seem constantly to be working out a problem of their being. It is as if their consideration of the world is made of heavy valuable metal and it is worth every particle of their being to hold it to their hearts.
Each figure holds to the instant, blind to the intensity of what is happening to the group. Yet the group redeems each one of them. It is the human pattern traced through them.
The painter’s stated subject (nailed to his studio wall) is “a few figures, a few objects, and the elements that connect them.” And the elements don’t just connect them either, but live in them.
Roger McDonald
2003