Jon Cattapan
VIC b.1956
Passage Set 2004
Oil on linen
Quadriptych 145 x 140 cm each
On loan from Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Jon Cattapan’s panoramic works investigate the intersection of physical, psychological and digital landscapes. It exemplifies the artist’s practice since the early 2000s, when he began exploring ways to represent post-industrial urban environments alongside the intangible flows of global information.
This four-panel work presents a series of vignettes of contemporary life set against atmospheric, layered backgrounds. Drawing on his own photographs as well as media imagery, Cattapan overlays these scenes with pulsating networks of red lines and points, suggestive of both city lights and digital data streams.
The influence of digital processes is integral to the work. Cattapan manipulates source imagery using software before translating it into paint, a process he has described as producing a ‘unique kind of mark making’. The result blurs the boundaries between analogue and digital modes of image creation.
Passage Set can be understood as a form of contemporary history painting, reflecting the artist’s attempt to map and interpret the complexities of a globalised, technologically mediated world through the enduring language of painting.
Passage Set can be viewed on Mezzanine Level.