Goya’s child

With more than a nod tothe so-called father of modern art, Adam Cullen dresses his grotesqueries in vibrant colour

Waking up with an Adam Cullen painting blaring at you from your bedroom wall might be a disconcerting experience. You could hang his work in the lounge room, perhaps, but that too might disturb the household’s equanimity.

The Sydney artist does paint nice paintings – his colourful Portrait of David Wenham 2000, which won the Archibald Prize that same year, is an example. But this bad boy of Australian art prefers to disturb, even when he does so with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

His first Brisbane exhibition, International Manure / Evil / DNA / Blood / Arse, now on at Heiser Gallery, is vintage Cullen, a mostly macabre mix of grotesquery that will satisfy fans while leaving some people cold.

The noble emu in Bad prehistoric Australian mega / bird, for example, is colourful and almost cute. But look closer and there is murderous intent in the eyes and the colour bleeding around the edges suggests a frayed reality. Apparently a prospective buyer of this work decided against it because it might have frightened the children. Perhaps Francisco Goya and Francis Bacon evoked similar responses from people who didn’t appreciate their intense aesthetic.

The art critic Christopher Allen said recently that Adam Cullen “deliberately takes ugliness to the point of provocation”. This is just the sort of behaviour you’d expect from an enfant terrible, although now that he is in his 40s perhaps he is too old to be an enfant.

His work displays a fascination with the dark side, although Cullen explores it in bright colours which sometimes belie his intent.

A sophisticated if somewhat black humour is at work. A classic example is his painting Australia, a blood red canvas featuring a dead, somewhat desiccated possum – the actual possum, that is. Cullen has a predilection for featuring road kill in his work and Australia is a wickedly witty commentary, typical of the way Cullen skilfully both shocks and woos his audience.

His exploration of the human condition has driven him to extreme lengths and he has had a penchant in his paintings for demonic clowns, decapitated creatures and outsiders.

Write me when I’m gone features a headless torso and a vaguely demonic nude male figure, which recurs in Last supper, a disturbing and vaguely erotic quasi-religious work.

Self portrait with a fur hat portrays the artist as obscured, damaged, unrecognisable and echoes Bacon’s disquieting portraiture.

It isn’t pretty but it is compelling.

The work which gave Cullen his road-to-Damascus artistic experience was Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, painted between 1819 and 1823, a bloody, mythological work in the Prado art museum in Madrid. As a ten year old, Cullen was apparently captivated by this amazing, horrifying painting. In Adam Cullen – Scars Last Longer (Craftsman House), the author Ingrid Periz says this painting affirmed his vocation. “I was absolutely in awe. I thought this is exactly what I want to do, it’s amazing. How long has this been happening – 300 or 400 years? I have to do this,” Adam says.

And he has. The results are as unsettling as they are intriguing. Seldom has darkness been so bright and that’s one of the conundrums of the work of Adam Cullen.

ADAM CULLEN – INTERNATIONAL MANURE / EVIL / DNA / BLOOD / ARSE, UNTIL NOV 29 AT HEISER GALLERY, 90 ARTHUR ST, FORTITUDE VALLEY. TUE-SAT, 10.30AM-6PM. PH 3254 2849.
WWW.HEISERGALLERY.COM.AU