Anthony Cahill - “There goes the neighbourhood,2.0.”

Essay below by Dr Glenn Wallace 

“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.”

Albert Camus[1]

Anthony Cahill’s exhibition at Straitjacket is an expanded iteration of “There goes the neighbourhood”, a two painting solo show at the 4^th Wall Gallery in Sydney. These paintings form a part of an ongoing series of work, where Cahill delves into the realm of absurdity, exploring notions of representation, landscape and human presence.

If accepting life as absurd is only the beginning, as Camus claimed, what can we glean from ‘absurd painting’ that might be of consequence and guide our actions today?

Anthony Cahill’s paintings juxtapose natural and cultural elements. Images of clouds, landscapes and human and non-human presence in the artist’s work appeal to our sense of beauty, of form and colour, and delight in nature, appearing as discrete elements in works that are both complete and ultimately, and invitingly, unknowable. Interventions both cosmic and banal are everywhere, forming or dissolving both in the paintings and at the edge of awareness, placed amid a compendium of mark making drawn from the knowledge gained from a lifetime of teaching and practice.

The happenstance of composition, and choice of images the artist suggests, can come from anywhere.[2] The logic of a painting can at times accord with a sense of formal rules. Yet Cahill’s landscape elements do not rely on the picturesque. The artist’s colour palette may play upon prevailing modes of aesthetic feeling, though not without subtle perturbations. Frisson is never at bay. Anatomically ‘correct’ figures appear less as representations of friends and acquaintances but instead an every-person, representing a disposition, a subject – is it the artist or viewer? – reflecting on what there is to see and what it means to see.

Aspects that can be made out most clearly in Cahill’s work often counter what else these paintings present. An illogical and unsettling sense of the absurd is seemingly at play. Arguably these contradictions represent the fundamental absurdity of the escalating intervention of human presence on the natural world whose beauty and mystery is in peril. A world in which excessive human intervention – whether through overdevelopment at the neighbourhood level which threatens the sense of community, or through the extraction of resources that threatens the global environment – must not be seen as the end, but rather the beginning of imagining different forms of action, of new forms of habitation and a new respect for the planet.

Cahill’s absurd paintings invite reflection and guide our actions by challenging us to ask ourselves what it means to be present, not only in front of these paintings, but in the world today.

Dr Glenn Wallace, September 2023

[1] Review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, published in the newspaper Alger Républicain (20 October 1938), p. 5; also quoted in Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd (2002) by Avi Sagi, p. 43. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Camus

[2] Artist interview with Annabelle Josse, Art and The Land, Contemporary artists talk about their connection to the Landscape https://artandtheland.com/2014/09/13/anthony-cahill/