Condition

To experiment is to play with things as they are and not as you might want them to be. In his 2019 book, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment, the late Thomas Elsaesser argues that every film should be regarded as a thought experiment. Experimentation, he suggests, is at its heart the act of deconstructing something and repositioning oneself in relation to it. Elsaesser writes that “play is essential for the formation of a self, and organised play leads not only to sociability, but also to the spirit of adventure and experimentation.” Elsaesser’s primary subject is cinema. However, Caesar Florence-Howard’s painting also evokes this sentiment. His work is experimental in this larger sense—an open-ended exploration of texture, colour, sound, and rhythm. Experimental film is often seen as a rejection of mainstream, “Hollywood”-styled narrative. Painting, mediated by cinema, can participate in this rejection too, in order to remake it.

Conners Conners, where you can see Florence-Howard’s most recent exhibition, Condition, is located in the Fitzroy Town Hall, a building flanked by magnificent Corinthian columns. Built in two different stages between 1873 and 1890, the building represents the legacy of Victorian Goldrush-era imperialism and grandeur. It once housed a courthouse and still has a functioning police station and municipal offices. In 2019 this civic space welcomed Conners Conners, a not-for-profit contemporary art space founded by artists Vincent Alessi, Ry Haskings, and Narelle Desmond. The cohabitation of a police station and an art gallery is emblematic of contemporary Fitzroy, which embraces elements in the community that would often be considered incongruous elsewhere.

Staring at the exhibition’s single, untitled work, I took note of its colour, tone, balance, and harmony, or lack thereof. All across the large canvas there are thick lines, skinny lines, dribbled lines, stretched lines, squashed lines and layered lines, which mesh to form a playful rhythm. My eyes dart around, trying to cast some kind of order amidst the underlying chaos of the fragmented and textured forms and colours—resin and varnish immersed in a mixture of subdued ochre tones and a sickening Slurpee-toned, Berocca orange, and bright pink. Nearly four metres wide, and two metres tall, the painting dominates the visual field for quick consumption, but it also requires time to digest. It is expressionist fast-food.

The painting is a diptych, comprising one large canvas with another elongated canvas joined to its left side. There is plenty of yellow smattered across the canvas, a colour that the artist has favoured in previous works such as those shown in his 2023 self-titled solo show at Sutton Projects. Florence-Howard’s yellow conjures up bodily excretions, like urine and vomit, heightening the overall grotesqueness of the work. The dominance of earthy hues of ochre and brown-green jars with smaller areas of bright, unnaturalistic colours. Any familiar application of colour theory is lost in the painting’s bamboozling myriad of frottage and textural mash-up, as fuliginous Orc-flesh green and ochre hues droop from the cotton canvas—it’s a monstrous image.

The painting’s subject matter comprises three squares on its vertical plane and five squares on its horizontal plane. In total there are fifteen squares, and each possesses its own personality. In some ways, the left canvas resembles a strip of three cells of film and the right canvas the 4:3 ratio of the cinematic image. The more I stare at the distinct squares the more I can see the faint outlines of the curved frames of television screens, like those in the opening of an episode of The Brady Brunch. I am not sure if I have a favourite square, but when considered as a whole they produce a harmonious monologue for the eye to read. The squares share an innate curiosity about the process of mark-making true to the European school of Tachism that emerged after the Second World War in opposition to its trans-Atlantic counterpart, Abstract Expressionism.

Florence-Howard’s dainty squares have emerged as a recurring motif since his Honours year in 2022 at Monash University, and are actually outlines of the stretcher-marks from behind the canvas. I realise, as I stare at the work through the door of the gallery, that it is framed not just by the stretcher-marks of the canvas itself, but also the visible wooden frames that scaffold the gallery walls on which it is installed. The work evokes an infinity mirror with limitless frames within frames, illustrating how a simple geometry can dissolve into circles of confusion.

My eyes dart to the bottom right corner of the work, where a gooey bricolage of sooty browns and thick and dense snottily-textured colours collide. When I look closer it resembles one of French surrealist Max Ernst’s paintings, and in particular his trademark technique of frottage, meaning “to rub” in French. This technique involves taking pencil or crayon rubbings from a textured surface. The playfulness of the painting therefore reflects an orgiastic conflation of colours and lines.

As I step closer to the work I peer into its finer details and its materiality becomes apparent. I can see playdough, breadcrumbs, and other chemical fluids scattered across the canvas in various shapes and sizes. In the top left corner, I can see what appears to be a washed out spread of grey paint sprinkled across the canvas with a distinct sharp blue outline. This technique is likely created by painting the back of the canvas before marking the front, producing the effect of the frottage.

The painting is also populated by all kinds of squiggly lines and marks reminiscent of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, whose playful paintings were informed by the simple motto of “taking a line for a walk.” In many ways, this method can be seen in the layers of texture that characterise the palimpsests of repeatedly graffitied walls in decaying urban metropolises. However, Florence-Howard’s painting carries an underlying scepticism towards painting’s capacity to represent or recapture reality. Instead, the painting seems to express something more like a kinship or solidarity with Melbourne’s urban architecture, and the mark-making practices that texture it.

Living in what Elsaesser also considered our “post-photographic” age, abstract art, and painting especially, remains one of the purest expressions of subjectivity – it is “adulterated experimentation,” in the way experimentation with film was also a challenge to the status quo. Florence-Howard’s persistence in painting therefore demonstrates a certain tenacity while demonstrating the relevance of painting a new world out of the old. By revelling in the practice of pure mark-making, Florence-Howard suggests a re-engagement with the medium-specificity of painting. The parallels between Florence-Howard’s painting and film do not only stem from their formal or aesthetic characteristics. This work at Conners Conners demonstrates the impossibility today of any painting unmediated by the influence of screens. Such contentious declarations still prove the importance of the plastic arts and playfully provocative painting in a world dominated by screens.