Djordje Ozbolt

Djordje Ozbolt is best known for his painted icon boards, at once playful and always multifarious in subject matter. For the new Herald St exhibition Ozbolt has extended his practice to incorporate a three dimensional presence, the main gallery offering up twelve double-sided paintings, each situated on their own plinth. Every painting depicts two portrait scenes, a duality seemingly unfolds somewhere between painterly abstraction and figuration.

Eleven of the works are orientated around a single higher placed work. This is not to signify the elevated work as more significant to the collective instead is a painterly mark of respect. The Hindu Lord Shiva is acknowledged in the artist’s depiction of the god’s representational avatar – ‘shiva linga’. In The Lord of Creation and Destruction the supreme deity is mediated pictorially by a double work that the artist explains as like ‘an old television set that crumples or expands into a single point or dot whether turning on or off’. The artist is interested in this doubling of meanings, to be at the beginning or end of a viewing experience, at life’s point of creation or destruction. Formally the paintings as installation are a three-dimensional divinity painting, the supreme highest, his followers around him.

Albert Durer’s St Jerome of 1495 is a reference point for Ozbolt in the new works, a painting whose style and device the artist has developed. Although Ozbolt refuses any hierarchy of orientation in the individually framed works as each side is given equal opportunity.

Why Me depicts an eighteenth century aristocrat as a mutated incarnation of the Hindu goddess Vishnu. Arms extended his five hands sign the title of the painting and in the background a precarious blade from a guillotine hovers awaiting its next victim. Perhaps the future victim is the gentleman centre foreground. On second thoughts his ingeniously signed exclamation signifies a desire to decry authority, “why me” perhaps relinquishing his hand as releaser of blade. A repent apology might be found on the alternate side, instead death is revealed as stylised cartoon blood seeps from under the frame.

Ozbolt’s paintings offer clues and a narrative with gaps to be filled by the viewer. Once implicated, as in Why Me, the viewer assigns the central character’s morality. If there isn’t a front and back present in these works there is a before and after. In the time it takes the viewer to circle to the other side of a work the depicted spectacle or central act has unfolded and they are solely faced with discarded remnants as piled quite literally in Slaughter.

Ozbolt’s practice exists as a sea of contradictions. Seemingly disparate sources but up against one another: humour and tragedy, historic themes align with popular culture. The artist has an almost childhood fascination in the despotic, the spiritual, the Neanderthal depicted as lone figure. Other cultures, the wondering ‘Sadhu’ or ‘Baba’ have inspired the artist during his yearly trips to the sub-continent. Spiritually enlightened yogis existing in a pocket of a society where hashish smoking is acceptable. As painting these followers of Hinduism are supplanted in a composition where representation is anchored strictly in Western pictorial tradition. In this regard Ozbolt directs a painterly play, a humorous meddling of themes and signs. The artist is acknowledging a past and a present, his own cultural heritage in a depiction of others, simultaneously painting into a future.

Djordje Ozbolt