Derek O’Connor in conversation with Richard Larter

There is an imposing force evident in the work of Derek O’Connor. It arrives at speed and in vivid colour to arrest your attention. With vital alarm, these painterly events compel the eye to action, immediately establishing a visceral relation between the artist and the viewer. Face to face with the work, I am unsettled, yet powerfully aware of my physical presence as a witness to the ritual activity of painting, its craft and surface. Opaque, worked and refusing to absorb me, I sense it commanding a different mode of social action.

In conversation with the work of his friend Richard Larter are presented a number of paintings by Derek O’Connor: works executed on the unbound covers of hard-backed ‘Time Life’ history books, along with some earlier counterpoints to these works made in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. While Larter and O’Connor are from different generations, both artists emigrated from the UK to Australia in the 1960s, each finding power in the juxtaposition of media imagery and abstraction.

Upon each of the book covers are fragments of imagery, both illustrated and redacted, archived, asserted and erased all at once. Due to the hand-held association of the book, the scale of the work is intimate compared to the immense ‘catastrophic landscape’ paintings O’Connor is well known for. Plate (2004), for instance, is a full-on display of painterly gesture accelerating towards meltdown, whereas the book cover paintings are less rhetorical, more subtractive in their method. Having established photographic images and films as source material for the earlier landscapes, O’Connor draws on documentary media as an energetic model for painterly interaction.

O’Connor’s intermedia strategy was born of a ‘post-punk’ disdain for the industry of (material) culture, and the increased professionalisation of art, which he experienced in the 1980s. In part a feverish and noisy reaction to the clinical cool of late conceptual art of the 1970s, and an altogether assault on the inhibiting conformity of ‘taste’ within the Australian art world, this new-wave of expression and doubt marked the beginnings of the tangled and splintered transition from modern to contemporary art.

Amidst the riotous spectacle of the new millennium, O’Connor sought-out a suitable aesthetic to convey the fragmented mode in which a fully globalised, and mediatised world was beginning to manifest itself. It’s one which he has realised most emphatically in these paintings, utilising the obsolete and serialised surface of the archival image to position his critical project within a contemporary culture ever more mediated by structures of power and violence.

Such a critical project requires sustained intensity and patience, which O’Connor, like Larter before him, has maintained by reanimating the cinematic technique of ‘superimposition’ – one body of material imposed with force upon another. In subjecting painting to the mechanism of photography, O’Connor generates from painting a document of energy and duration: each singular volume of the book covers contains layers of repeated action and reaction, a collection of compounded intensities from different visual registers, each holding its physicality and its edge to slip, and be separated by spaces of deep-thought and duration.

O’Connor’s chronology of petrified surface gestures run in parallel to the photographic, to the extent that they are revealed as simultaneously incommensurable events of the past and immediate assertions of physicality.

These paintings are not an ‘expression’ of the artist’s will, rather they represent an internalised and considered aesthetic response to the structures of knowledge which O’Connor beholds in the world. The paintings don’t necessarily evoke the violence of history through erasure, nor do they act as remedies to alleviate this-or-that crisis, rather they exist now as performative events in your vision, always seen at a remove, reanimated – as if witnessing a disaster on the news, in a mass-circulated bubble, mediated in beautifully vibrant colour and motion.

Oscar Capezio,
Curator ANU Art Collection

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O’Connor’s work on display in the Riverbend Room alongside our exhibitions Richard Larter: Free Radical and Riffing On: Pat Larter’s Rhythms and Pete Maloney’s Blues until 19 January 2025.