CRAIG EASTON
Craig Easton is a Melbourne based artist dealing with the intersection of Pop, Minimalist, Formalist, and architectural codes through the languages of abstract painting. He has held 19 solo exhibitions since 1996. Most recently: Container at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne (September 2007), and Finish at Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane (August 2007). His work has featured in curated shows in Australia and New Zealand with recent exhibitions including Constructive Propositions at Peloton Sydney,The Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at Bendigo Art Gallery and Respirator at Conical Melbourne. Easton’s work is held in collections including National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank, Federal Court of Australia, and National Australia Bank. He holds an MA from RMIT University and has lectured at RMIT, Monash, and the Victorian College of the Arts. Easton smoothly elides categorization. Like his conceptual interests, his output has no structures but moves between painting, installation, wall drawing, shelf works, modular containers and shaped canvases. Despite this diversity, Easton is a painter and his extended practice into other arenas is treated as a painterly problem and as a means to extend painting itself.
In Easton's works there is always a play between what is real, what is represented and what the nature of abstraction might be. His paintings are stratified physically and conceptually, Formally they often result from the application of multiple layers of paint - a process revealed in the archaeological traces off masking tape deliberately peeled back to reveal the ground beneath. At other times, the masking tape appears still stuck to the surface but is actually a tromp l'oeil painting of the masking tape.
Ultimately, amongst the vast cross referencing and intertextual allusion it is these two terms - the real and the abstract - that are at issue in all of Easton's work. This is a fundamental, philosophical problem made more complex and evermore pertinent by our hypermodern, abstract world. Easton, however, addresses these 'abstract' philosophical issues through materiality, as artists do.
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