French Painting from Les Romans de Cape et D’epee series, 1987
oil on canvas
239 x 189 cm (image); 248 x 195 cm (frame)
signed and dated ‘Susan Norrie/87’ (lower right)
Provenance
Painted in Hautvillers (outside of Paris in the Champagne Region), France during the artist's residency with Moet & Chandon
Mori Gallery, Sydney
Estate of the Late Tom & Eva Breuer, Sydney
Exhibited
Susan Norrie, L'Hotel Pozzo di Borgo, Paris, November 1987; Galerie Passages, Troves, 9 January - 28 February 1988 and Foire D'Art Contemporain, Stockholm, 16-21 March 1988
Literature
Moira McConnell, 'Susan Norrie - French polish', Good Weekend, date unknown (circa 1987), p.20-24; illus. p.21
Gregory Burke, Breathing Space: Painting and surface displacement in the work of Susan Norrie, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1994, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d34daba05ccc80001b069a6/t/5fcd3d019aa2de0c649fd13a/1607286017407/Norrie-Breathing+Space.pdf
"Coinciding with that residency (Moët et Chandon fellow in France in 1987), Norrie produced a suite of paintings that formed the
basis of successive exhibitions in Paris and Troyes. Titled les roman de cape et d’épée, these
works, coupled with their installation in distinctly different spaces, advanced concerns and
introduced conceptual strategies that have come to characterise her recent practice as an artist
and painter.
In particular, with these works, Norrie initiated her paradoxical treatment of painting as subject, surface, and object; as well as her frictional siting of painting within and against overlapping subjective and objective constructs of space.
In many ways the two installations were parts of the one project. The first was remarkable in that it took place in l'Hotel Pozzo di Bargo in the course of one night, a temporal frame suggestive of the performative, of dreaming, of the rhythms of the body. Set up in the ballroom of a large aristocratic eighteenth-century house, the presence these paintings achieved was emphasised by their overarching scale and their placement on easels.
Unrestrained by the perimeter wall this unruly configuration transgressed that very boundary
that paintings conventionally embellish. But despite their move into sculptural space, the works
paraded their status as surfaces, tensioned by multiple references to discrete moments in the
history of painting. Simultaneously mannerist, heroic and pop in sensibility, these renderings of
mythical subjects meddled with the conventions of portraiture. Their carnivalesque quality
merged with the system of their display to nuance their surrogate role as players, a theatricality
further accentuated by Norrie's use of stage lighting. Thus, transformed by the shifting parameters of reception, the works synchronised both an entry into and a description of an
expository space." (Gregory Burke, Breathing Space: Painting and surface displacement in the work of Susan Norrie, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1994)
Image courtesy of the artist