Even The Golden Ratio Can Make Me Feel Blue
Exhibition

Jordan Grant was the inaugural recipient of the Kyneton residency of The Macfarlane Fund in 2017. A recent RMIT Fine Arts graduate, his painting practice inhabits a romantic, expressive sensibility as a form within which to explore our complex and ambiguous relationships with images and stimuli.  

His body of work for this exhibition investigates apophenia (the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data), as a coping mechanism to distil the torrents of information the contemporary subject encounters on a daily basis. Depictions of found patterns interrupt the gestural surface as symbols of this human rationale, and sit within abstractions of landscape as well as references to various painters of influence, in particular Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich’s notions of the sublime are summoned as a counterpoint to the various decorative motifs, where order and pattern-cognition are eschewed and the infinitude of the natural world is all-consuming. 

By apposing the ambiguous schema of the sublime and the geometric spirit of rationalism, the painting surface becomes a space for open contemplation as much as affective impetus. 

In the midst of infinite births and deaths, in the midst of decay, leaves falling from trees, and waves on the sea—all the infinite chaotic events that randomly occur in the universe—the only stunning and unexpected thing is our inexhaustible craving for sense, harmony, and order.

-Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

This show is dedicated to Rhys Cauzzo, dear friend and author of the show’s title.

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