Eugene Carchesio your face is a ghost

27 January –
24 February 2024

For over 40 years Eugene Carchesio has been creating small-scale watercolours and cardboard constructions, piquing curiosity and inspiring quiet deliberation. In the exhibition your face is a ghost, the artist presents a new body of wall-mounted sculptures alongside cyclical works on paper, each demonstrative of the artist’s relentless pursuit of the minimal through repetition.

Transforming commonplace yet ambivalent subjects, Carchesio invigorates the minutiae of his everyday surroundings. A cursory map of Australia is articulated seventeen times, ingraining its contours through the lyrical curvatures of watercolour paint. Made in light of the Voice referendum in October 2023, Carchesio presents a potent form significantly reduced. This dearth of detail fosters a ghostly sense of absence and unfamiliarity, channelling notions of detachment and uncertainty. The artist proposes a lulling, surreal visual narrative as conduit to invite further introspection, furtively interrogating the equivocal symbolism imposed by this iconic silhouette.

Carchesio’s pared back formal tradition is one that is steeped in mystery and mythology with enduring, often paradoxical, qualities of presence and weightlessness. Harnessing oppositional forces, Carchesio utitlises materials and frameworks both unremarkable and ephemeral. your face is a ghost distils a lexicon of signs and symbols in a continuation of a long-standing material and conceptual experimentation, inviting in the viewer to propose their own solutions to rhetorical problems.

Selected solo exhibitions

your face is a ghost, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2024; UNTITLED, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2022; from here to here…, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2021; No Question No Answer, Milani Gallery, Brisbane 2020; 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.

Selected 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; Slowness, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2011; Hybrid & Folklore, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2010.