David Harley - Recent Works

 

Sheridan Palmer,

Imprint, Spring, 2001.

 

 

 

Form in the narrower sense is nothing more than the delineation

 

of one surface from another. This is the external description...

 

yet every form has inner content. Form is... the expression of

 

inner content. Kandinsky

 

 

 

David Harley has emerged in recent years as one the most computer-experienced

 

artists working in Melbourne. His extraordinary synthesis of the digital machine,

 

intuitive subjectivity and the creative impulse has produced works ranging from

 

great beauty to visually confronting optics. This contemporary affiliation of

 

computers and art has become an authorised medium, one which has developed a

 

new sub-intermediary world and one which is making technological and scientific

 

advances at such a rapid rate that keeping abreast of what is new is a major

 

commitment in itself . The digital field is so vast that in itself it invites a freedom of

 

approach and expression which has noticeably been embraced by the youth culture

 

as much as being seen at the doyen of deconstructive post modernism.

 

Whilst Harley sits at the vanguard of digital art in Australia, much of his imagery

 

remains consistent with his personalised ideology. From his body of Work, such as

 

the print Janacek to his more recent large scale work Divertimento, shown at the

 

RMIT Project space in 2000, Harley pursues the purity of form, a lyrical abstraction

 

which is identifiable as a primal reaction within an aesthetic concept, a concept that

 

has an inherent programme of choice. As David Harley has said the computer used

 

as a tool 'encourages speculative work because it defies finality which one is

 

conscious of in painting'. Indeed it is in the context of Harley's background as a

 

painter that we must place his digital prints for one feeds the other.

 

Harley's digital prints largely emanate from his concerns of painting, and he finds

 

tha4 he is unable to move away from painterly effects. As with his painting, Harley

 

uses music to mobilise his imaginative responses to form and colour, and thus it is

 

seen as a seminal component in the construction of his digital prints. Music

 

therefore becomes one of the agents that carries the metaphors for atmosphere

 

and the poetics of the work, but we must also consider that 'the genre demands

 

imaginative participation'. Indeed, the imaginative response is possibly more

 

important in Harley's case than a dialectical one. His 1999 digital print Parsifal and

 

his more recent Mauve and Blue Beard's Castle are fine examples of his more

 

elegiac and sensual pictorial compositions. They are metaphysical responses and

 

correlative forms to music, the virtual space and depth invite the eye beyond and

 

behind to become part of the ethereal mists or the ballooning fecundity of the

 

image. It is this romantic structuring of abstract space and form which puts Harley's

 

works among some of the most pleasurable and beautiful that I know. It is the

 

illusory factor, the extraordinary colour relationships which cohabit with the virtual

 

dimension that suggests a potentiality that is hard to achieve with other more

 

traditional mediums.

 

Harley acknowledges the early modernist painters such as Kandinsky and Klee,

 

whose work he considers rigorous and universalist. Both artists created a whole

 

new language and their concern for composition placed them as 'innovators of the

 

gestural and the expansive pictorial plane'. His interest in the German

 

Expressionists and particular artists from Der Blaue Reiter group helped Harley to

 

understand the vibrancy of polyphonic presence in colour and art. The parallelism

 

of music, form and colour is consciousness merging, synthesising with his

 

subconscious, the computer providing the means by which these art forms attain

 

almost a unionistic whole. Qther important artists who have influenced Harley are

 

Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Tony Tuckson and Len Crawford. Crawford,

 

who taught at RMIT, became an important reference and influence for Harley during

 

his student phase. Harley's empathy for Crawford's art is detected by a sensitivity

 

which marks both these artists' work.

 

In his more recent work such as Diversimento there is greater play with chaos,

 

which may indicate his desire for experimentation with the computer, pushing the

 

boundaries of the machine as much as his own creative parameter. Within this freeplay

 

experimentation there is clearly objective editing, with recession or protrusion

 

being determined by a greater use of black which operates both as the negative

 

shadow while also performing an autonomous and sculptural dimension. We see

 

Harley manipulating low resolution or pumping a shape to high resolution, the areas

 

of diffusion often intersected by fine hair lines, which create, as Harley says

 

'different spatial experiences in the presence of the work'. In his more notational

 

fugues, as with the collaborative Allegro Maestoso series of prints made with the

 

American artist/digital printmaker Tom Ashe, we see a more decisive linear

 

structure and display of optical formalism, as well as being more considered in its sequential chromatism.

 

A line of variable direction, that traces no

 

contour, and delimits no form.

 

Deleuze and Guattari

 

The art of digital printmaking offers the artist a process of creating and editing that

 

is both infinite and reversible, thereby making this medium unique and retrievable at

 

all stages of its development. When Harley returns to his painting it is not a case of

 

replication of the digital medium but rather his interest in creating the fluid staining

 

and virtual marking of space. He takes the idea of the digital and transfers that idea

 

to canvas where the composition appears to merge within the structural concept

 

that he has been working with in the computer. This parallelism of working with two

 

mediums is challenging for he finds that many of his ideas are more achievable in

 

digital printmaking than in painting. The paradox of digital art is that it is both a

 

composite of 'finite modes' but also forms a train of infinite procession. Its ability to

 

decompose and recompose, randomly or selectively, adds to its duality. The postmodernist

 

machine has redefined art and has assisted in creating a neoabstraction.

 

 

 

Sheridan Palmer is a Melbourne writer and curator