As you wander out to the backyard of the house on the edge of Alice Springs and into the left side bungalow, one of 2 matching studios that sit facing each other either side of the bush garden, one Wayne Eager's, the other belonging to his partner, the painter Marina Strocchi, the pictures are everywhere. Stacked in piles against each available wall; the works on paper are not visible; they’re on the bench waiting a call out; maybe in another game. So how do I view these pictures? They are decidedly abstract; any suggestion of figuration is only in the eye of the viewer and not intended; they are obviously redolent of many moments in paintings’ long history, but there is no obvious similarity with any paintings or periods already known and existing. There are huge nods to a myriad of his favorites, regularly posted without any written addenda on Facebook. But to talk about these pictures with Wayne, or in fact here, I have to find some other means to unlock the surfaces, the processes. It is not helpful to suggest similarities to Aboriginal Painting of which he is an avowed authority, or to Fairweather, Kemp, Tuckson, Williams or any of Australia’s mid 20thC masters. It is pointless bringing up any of the theoretic discourses around Contemporary Art, these works act like a ping pong bat to any of those notions and they land back flat on the floor. So my means is to use music.
Music and Wayne (Iggy) are totally inseparable. As far back as I remember there was always music; cassettes with hand written sleeves containing music from all different parts of Africa and the middle East; from Israel, Bulgaria, in fact anywhere in the world where music is performed with some degree of ceremony, history, as part of culture. But also smatterings of Hendrix, Fungus Brains, Dirty Three, classical, jazz……… My musical education is indebted to his enthusiasms; how often have I walked into a studio, space, house, living room of Wayne’s to hear ’Tony Mighell, you just have to listen to this’ as he shoved a cassette into the machine or more recently CDs. My earliest introduction to Bach’s Concertos for violin was out at his family home in Wandin Victoria, where classical music was played at all times of the day in the mud brick house set amongst virgin bush, as others would listen to talk back or ABC. So when I encounter his most recent paintings and a proper response is not only asked for but is absolutely expected, the means I find to see them, talk about them is in terms of structure and music. I see symphonic depth as he slowly, sometimes over many years, evolves themes and movements in individual pictures; these both spread across the surface and into the layers, sometimes getting so dense that you hunt for a more complex structural reference than symphony. There are notes and swathes, marks and smudges, long looping lines and dense patterning, like a play off between violin and viola or more likely a kora and an electric guitar. But there are also substructures, big movements that articulate the whole of the picture and allow the smaller syncopations to have somewhere to rest. But how does he finish these extended opuses? If you are not relying on the speed of the action or the complex built relationship with subject, whether that is subject matter of motif, then when is the picture finished? It might be the addition of a slightly different tone that picks up part of the structure in isolated instances; like the shift in a composition to allow the viola to play a longer note in a few sections; a seemingly ‘little’ change that pitches the picture that much higher, clearer, sweeter. Or there is the final cancelling out, yet again, of some surface incident that allows the substructure to sit comfortably with the higher notes/marks/patterns that flit across the surface sometimes as beats, sometimes as tonal harmony, sometimes as drone mood.
Walter Pater said, "all art constantly aspires to the condition of music”. With Wayne’s pictures, this is such a given that it hardly needs the words of a 19th Century philosopher as confirmation, justification, explanation.
These are slow dense pictures; they evolve and can take a long time to complete; they come at the viewer slowly and can take time to see. It is good a show is happening; these pictures need to put on their hats and coats and be seen in the world.