ARTIST PROFILE
DALE FRANK
3- // Dale Frank, Adding insult to injury
with a hot potato, 2015. Polyurethane on
anodised Perspex, 200 x 160cm.
COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND NEON PARC, MELBOURNE
and haemorrhages of iridescent and opalescent
varnish slithering like threads of saliva or swelling in
tumescent and tumorous globules in the paintings
of the past decade or so. Across this career, Frank’s
visual idiom is irrepressibly febrile and luscious...
and corrupt. We might be tempted to judge his taste
for lurid, dazzlingly synthetic colour combinations
(and their glut of kitschy associations with disco
psychedelia and casino hotel décor) as indulgently
decadent. But, contrary to what might seem to be
their slick ambience, these are not representational
works of art, not even by association with the glossy
materials of Pop glamour, glitter or licentiousness.
We might be tempted, too, to think of the surges,
blooms and dribbles of the varnish paintings, with
their notorious drying times, as punk or recklessly
accidental (some still drooling or drooping down to
the floor years after being acquired). But no matter
how spontaneous or buoyantly serendipitous the
activity, the agility of execution and conception in
almost all of Frank’s work demonstrates indisputable
finesse and intuitive control that’s only won through
dogged and deep experimentation, even if much of
that seems like daredevil trial and error. And it has
to be noted that Frank’s paintings don’t deferentially
dry in the air, with that insinuation of a domestic
process – they liquefy like magma, they incandesce
and stun like plasma, swarm and bustle like an infes-
tation, condense with the murky threat of a viscous
miasma, they warp, set, congeal, adhere, they harden.
That’s to say, these works are phase changes of matter
and energy, abstract but also literal, and customised
under the exertion of nonstandard physical forces: a
kind of sorcery. The most recent interactions of resin
goop, vast veils of blood, scattered crystals, liquid glass
and Perspex can be – in the studio – as dangerously
explosive as an inspired unholy Promethean science
conducted in a gothic castle tower. These are conju-
rations of a dark cosmological catastrophe in a fierce
mirror that dazzles with a vision of demonic glory.❱ GOW LANGSFORD GALLERY, AUCKLAND (STAND
D3) AND NEON PARC, MELBOURNE (STAND A5)
PRESENT WORK BY DALE FRANK AT AAF 2018.