Since the 1980s, Eugene Carchesio has produced small scale drawings, watercolours and minute cardboard sculptures. Carefully placed elements of geometric abstraction and figurative symbolism coalesce within his compositions, forming an ontological space emptied of the clutter of everyday life. Carchesio is unconcerned with durability, instead favouring the fragility and uncertainty of ephemeral materials such as matchboxes and paper ephemera. His quietly focused, intimate works stand in contrast to increasingly glossy, inflated modes of contemporary art and provide us with moments of welcome reprieve amid the chaos of modern life.
Select solo exhibitions: your face is a ghost, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2024; Untitled, Milani Gallery, 2022; from here to here…, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2021; Conscious Intuition, Eugene Carchesio and Diena Georgetti, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2019; The Ventriloquist (vol.2) Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2019; The Ventriloquist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2018; The NO-BETWEEN, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; Mystics and Prophets, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2015; 21 years in this space – works from the museum of contemporary $ilence [melbourne division], Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2013; Stars ignite between the death of mountains, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2011; Someone’s Universe: The Art of Eugene Carchesio, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2008; everything takes time takes everything, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2006; Heliocentricities, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane, 2002.
Select group exhibitions: The National 4: Australian Art Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney, 2023; ARTIST POET POEISIS, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2022; Birds & Language, Wollongong Art Gallery, Wollongong, 2019; reciproco/RECIPROCAL Carlton, Melbourne 2019; Monochrome, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2018; Call of the Avant-Garde, Constructivism & Australian Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2017; Shut Up and Paint, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2016; Sugar Spin: You, me, art and everything, QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2016; The Kaleidoscopic Turn, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2015; Negotiating This World: Contemporary Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2012; Imaginary Boys, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2011; Hybrid & Folklore, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2010.
Artist's CV (PDF)Eugene Carchesio is an artist who, primarily, deals neither with poetry nor emotion nor symbolic narrative, but directly with metaphysics – that is with the problem of Being.
Ursula Szulakowska, 1999