Chinoiserie Landscape ,
1987-1993
oil on canvas panel
30.2 x 22.7 cm each panel (diptych)
signed, dated & inscribed with title ‘Chinoiserie/Landscape/1987-93/Tony Clark’ (on the reverse)
SOLD
Provenance
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Colin & Elizabeth Laverty collection, Sydney
"Most Chinoiserie works consist of painted renditions of small plasticine models Clark made after classical funerary buildings, often given a Chinese inflexion via upturned gables in the manner of pagoda architecture. These ropy little structures hover in front of the flattest of painted backgrounds; the globular, biomorphic shapes of tri-color military camouflage. Camouflage: the painted ornament that dissimulates objects by taking on a look of generalised vegetal form and colour....
Camouflage has a visual variegation that, when (mis)matched with Clarke's Pagoda Temple images, kept the Chinoiserie Landscapes in the realm of the isolated easel picture. True decoration needs sameness to expand out over architectural surfaces." (Roger Benjamin, "Tony Clark - Mysteries of the Villa Sino-Romana", Art and Text, No.44, 1993, p.40)
After first exhibiting the series in the late 1980s, Clark has since revisited this theme with new variations on the theme exhibited in Chinoiserie Landscape 1987-2017, Murray White Room, Melbourne (2018).