Raafat Ishak, Nicholas Mangan, John Meade and Alexis Kanatsios, Nusra Latif Qureshi Sydney Contemporary 2024

For Sydney Contemporary 2024, Sutton Gallery presents works by five Naarm-based artists: Raafat Ishak, Nicholas Mangan, John Meade and Alexis Kanatsios, and Nusra Latif Qureshi.

Nicholas Mangan’s work Friday the 13th (2009/2024) pictures the sun as seen from his apartment in Naarm on 13 February 2009, seven days after the catastrophic Black Saturday bush fires. Reeling with a sense of unchartered force, Mangan’s instinct to document the sun at this precarious moment in time explores its uniquely multivalent properties. On the one hand, the sun provides a constant and immutable source of enriching nourishment, figured as the ultimate democratic source of life for all to behold and depict. And yet, this particular depiction offers a daunting reminder of the minutiae that typifies the human condition, especially poignant given our positioning within a maelstrom of climate crises. A recurrent motif throughout his work, Mangan has long been preoccupied with examining the ways in which the sun has historically acted as a metaphor for the commons. This work further relates to the artist’s acclaimed series Ancient Lights (2015), an installation of sculptural, photographic and filmic components activated with energy generated by solar panels installed in-situ. Most recently, the photograph was on show in the artist’s mid-career survey exhibition A World Undone at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney.

Raafat Ishak’s paintings unfold and unravel at a dissonant rhythm, codifying history and culture to uncover the fluidity of one’s position within it. Similarly invoking the undefinable nature of the sun, Ishak’s polychrome studies reiterate forms to function as heuristic devices in the artist’s attempt to represent the colour of the sun. This speculative exercise alludes to the saturation of image distribution today as each splintered composition never reaches total crystallisation. The recurrence of constructivist cubes, hot air balloons and fighter planes, depicted amid a litany of varying architectural and amorphous forms, unsettles their stasis and significance as independent symbols. Presented side-by-side, the congruence of each painting generates an array of conceptual contradictions and formal dichotomies: engineered yet organic, personal yet estranged, dynamic yet static. Seen within his wider practice, each panel invokes the guiding principles and points of reference that have materialised throughout Ishak’s career: the boundlessness of Modernist abstraction, the fractious nature of statehood and belonging, and the experiential resonance of architecture.

Similarly representing an ambivalent relationship to one’s place within history, three paintings by Nusra Latif Qureshi exemplify the artist’s unflinching approach to figuration. Delicate yet confronting, Qureshi’s works pull at the seams of colonial visual traditions to reveal gaps and erasures. Responding to the formal rigidities and decorative splendour of Mughal miniature painting (musaviri), Qureshi fragments the linear and monolithic characterisations of identity and place through a detailed process of layering imagery. Intricately composed and overlapping surfaces lull the viewer into momentary repose, swiftly followed by tender provocations of uncertainty and chaos, love and loss. Following their presentation at Sydney Contemporary, these meticulously rendered vignettes will be on show in the artist’s forthcoming survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, opening in November 2024.

The slick, nodal sculpture Neuro (2024), produced by John Meade in collaboration with artist Alexis Kanatsios, further communicates notions of mediated desire. Carrying with it many of Meade’s signature sculptural impulses of surreality and sensuality, this collaborative work co-opts architectural systems of structure, modularity and cohesion while giving rise to corporeal and organic implications. Refined with an ostensibly machinic precision and polish, the work’s smooth elliptic surface brings to mind the lure and seduction of contemporary product design. Working together for the first time, the work denotes two studio practices led by intuition and form itself as much as historical precedence. Consequently, Neuro is a wall mounted sculpture carefully attuned by the formal sensibilities of both artists, retaining a sense of autonomy and orchestrated poise.

Complimenting Neuro is a new bronze edition by John Meade entitled Asterisk (2024). A typographical symbol with its origin as far back as the ice age, the small-scale sculpture has an immediacy of form that beholds a spatial resonance far beyond its proportions.