Published April 2015
in Art Guide Australia
Tactile yet seemingly fragile, Mason Kimber’s frescos for his first solo show at Sydney’s Galerie pompom provoke contradictory responses: to touch, at the risk of adding to the apparent erosion, but also to protect what is left.
Oltre la Vista – or “beyond the view” – is a poignant play on the slipperiness of memory, feeling and meaning, and Kimber’s daring use of materials and ideas in the frescos in particular succeed by evoking some unnamed nostalgia – not as sentiment but as the pain of an old wound and a lost world.
Fresco 3, 2015, pigment, sand & lime plaster on plywood, 41 x 36 cm
Six of the 13 works here are an alchemy of pigment on sand and high-calcium lime plaster, the chemical reaction leaving a grainy surface. It seems as though the works have been excavated from a Roman ruin. The plaster forms a ragged, sandy frame closing around abstract images of angular window frames, looking onto distant aqua sea or perhaps sky.
Kimber paints fresh onto the plaster, just before it completely dries, so that the art and its architecture are one. “Fresco is known as one of the hardest mediums to work with,” he says, “but I think the unique effects it produces are worth the effort.”
The artist’s play with our perception was born of an interest in spatial perspective and illusion, stemming from a three-month artist’s studio residency at the British School at Rome. The recurring aqua motif though appears homegrown: he grew up in Cottesloe, Perth, between the Swan River and the Indian Ocean.
The other seven works are oil on canvas. Visually, it’s a contradictory shock, having spent time studying the frescos, to then look at the largest of the oil works, Thinking Slow, Painting Fast, 2015, with its much bolder green background and fragment of a male torso. It’s dominant and demanding of your attention, compared to the frescos’ suggestion of fading light and life.
The canvas works encourage Kimber’s bolder palette of colours and are more evocative of built spaces and their multiple, angular perspectives. Yet it’s the frescos, with their subtlety of colour and concept, reaching to the natural world, that invite the viewer to linger.