Opinion Fatigue marks another turn in the wide-ranging practice of Queensland conceptual artist Sebastian Moody. In this new body of work, he fuses his love of modern painting, language, and meaning. These paintings continue in the tradition of 1960s and ‘70s Australian concrete poetry, which used mechanical and commercial applications of text to expand possibilities for artmaking. Unlike Moody’s previous text works where the meaning of the words is central to the concept, each work problematises our logical understanding of language by moving away from poetry and closer towards abstract expressionism.
While Moody’s paintings clearly reference concrete poetry, they focus less on language and sound, and more on the shapes of the punctuation, letters and clusters that they make. There is a desire to ‘read’ the paintings by grouping and omitting parts of the text. These clusters or ‘constellations’ of text that occupy the plane instead of fields of colour and brushstrokes are reminiscent of the sparse gestural scribbles of Antoni Tàpies or Cy Twombly. The paintings also carry something of the strict, rule-based processes of conceptualism. Designed in Microsoft Word, they utilise the inherent flatness and simplicity of the word processing software to expose the finite possibilities of the grid. Each point on the grid is an option to assign—or not assign—a single piece of data. This mechanical gambling aesthetic contradicts the painting’s ‘expressionism’ and, like Fluxus artists tossing coins to make the broken and solid lines of the I Ching, reveals the random esoteric structures of the universe through chance.
Opening Event: Friday 22 July 2022, 6-8pm
Image: Sebastian Moody, Opinion Fatigue (black feather), 2022, acrylic on Marine Plywood, 120 x 120 cm. Photograph: Joe Ruckli. Image courtesy of the artist and Onespace Gallery
