GARY WILLIS is a disturbing artist. His images, reflecting
the inner thoughts we sometimes speak but rarely enact, are
not intended to be ''nice pictures''. Willis has always been
something of a tearaway, growing up around south east
Australia in the radical Sixties and Seventies, prepared to
lose blood on stage in the name of art

He comes from a time when painters, sculptors, performance
artists and musicians threw away the rule books and explored
the limits of their professions. But those days seemed to
die with the materialist Eighties and the young
conservatives emerging from art schools, particularly in
Britain - once the most radical of art hothouses - are
contributing few new ideas

The revolution which spawned Hockney, Warhol and Durant
seems to have lost some of its impetus

Willis's work has a long tradition of expressing most
dramatically real pain, anger, hurt and joy. He returned to
Australia in 1981 after a period in New York to create the
12-movement "And The Leopard Looked Like Me" for the
Adelaide Arts Festival and the Canberra Performance
Festival. It involved live and bloody knife fights with co-
performer, Richard Boulez as the leopard and Willis as
trainer. Boulez was armed with a knife and Willis had a
chair. Blood sprayed freely as the two tangled.

"Leopard" was the reconstruction of a long detailed dream,
distilling the experiences of the time Willis had spent at
the Chelsea Hotel, around the Andy Warhol clique, the Mudd
Club, and the aggression of the city. It was certainly
volatile. In another sequence Boulez whipped him into a
frenzied running on the spot that ended with Willis,
physically exhausted, collapsing to the floor. He rests to
catch his breath and stands up, only for the scene to be
repeated. And repeated

It was an attempt to capture a particular intellectual
moment and represent it publicly. His ''Identification:
specific'' exhibitions in Amsterdam and London - his first
in Europe since 1984 - are direct descendents of what Willis
calls ''giving a voice to the other'' - representing an
intellectual/emotional moment.

A significant visual work emerging from Willis's neo-pop
NewYork period (1978-80) is "The Five Senses" suite in
coloured electrical tape laminated into heavy plastic
sheeting, in which Willis attempted to locate his essential
experience of New York. The five - Feel Like Target, Tastes
Like Goodbye, Sounds Like You Do, Looks Like It Is, Smells
Like Success are dramatic.

Feel Like Target is appropriated from an image of Marilyn
Monroe with her dress blown up over a subway grate,except
Willis's model is bending over, but ''between the hairs and
holes you are looking down the barrel of a gun,''says Willis

Willis's innovation in ''giving a voice to the other'' is
his concentration on understanding the interaction between
the materials that create the work, the thought, the idea
and the artist. It is essential rather than coincidental to
say some-thing significant, and to find a new way of saying
it. Content and form both have to be potent and radical.

Classically trained at the Canberra School of Art, Willis
transfered to Melbourne's conceptual-oriented Phillip
Institute. His work has ranged from murals for Fitzroy's
avant garde cabaret 'The Flying Trapeze Cafe' to menu cover
drawings for the Burdekin Hotel in Darlinghurst as well as
video art for festivals in Tokyo, Paris, Munich and Sydney.
His prize-winning works have been purchased by the
Australian National University, and the Australian National
Gallery, as well as state galleries and private collections
across Australia and abroad.

The son of a Canberra butcher, Willis has lived in Sydney,
Melbourne and at the Aboriginal settlement of Amoonguna
nearAlice Springs. He has travelled widely, studying
philosophy, anthropology and Buddhist culture and has taught
art and computer graphics in Australia and the United
Kingdom. In 1984 he was appointed Australia Council Artist
in Residence at the British Council-funded Air Gallery in
London.

Since his 1990 return to London, he has been endlessly
concerned with the interplay of materials and subject: the
varying thicknesses of the oil paint, the quality of the
cloth surface, the use of palette knives, the brushes and
the base material - the inner, vulnerable, protected self.
Willis uses portraiture to practice the realism required for
these more conceptual pictures and is rarely without a book
and pencils, even for a quick tube ride into Central London
to see a movie. He is a compulsive scribbler, but these most
exacting and formal studies are never shown.

''I don't intend to disturb,'' Willis says, reflecting on
the 50cm x 70cm unframed pieces strewn on the floor of his
basement flat in the Boyd family's Highgate house, and on
the small couch. Two recently completed works are drying on
a line in thehall. ''I push the image to a point of
excitement in myself

"I keep pushing it around until I get, in the moment of
doing it, that feeling of 'Aha, now I'm getting it. Now it's
heating up. Yes, ooh. Now it's hot' and I keep pushing it
until it gets that kind of an edge. It doesn't interest me
unless I have got that connection with the image. It's not
that they're totally outrageous .. they're not outrageous,
but they can be uncomfortable. They're not operating on a
'nice picture' level.''

As the paint is applied, the images change repeatedly,
shifting levels, sifting thoughts, before they begin to
resolve themselves, rarely ending where they started. As the
content develops, Willis searches for ''a better
understanding of theimage required to represent the
particular aspect of the human condition I'm experiencing at
that time. And usually I am gunning for some sort of edge in
myself.''

His finished works are frequently, but not exclusively thick
... and unframed are deceptively heavy. You can feel the
weight of the paint on the paper. This new and specific
image style is the beginning of a process, rather than its
completion. Willis is still experimenting with subjects and
materials and the works vary considerably intexture and
concept, while retaining a clear stylistic consistency. They
take a long time to grow on you, but they become compulsive.

Once seen and understood, a Gary Willis painting is
recognizable. Some evoke responses easily. "Drifter" is neo-
realist and easily accessible - a figure trudging along a
shoreline. "Poet's last shot" captures a drunk hurling a
glass across a room. Others are more difficult and
understanding is improved with an explanation of the moment
by the artist. They can be as instantly recognizable as they
can be unfathomable, creating room for the debate on our
ability to share common perceptions ... to know what someone
else knows, feel what they feel. In "A final glimpse of
Eden" the glance - a schmear of white paint - from a woman
he had barely met, is interpreted as having ''enormous
potential for the downfall of Eden''. It was a moment we
know and recognize in our own lives - someone seen stepping
onto a departing train, requiring an instant, but momentous
decision.

''I am painting what exists. It's a psychological landscape.
I'm not making tasteful pictures. I'm representing the human
condition and it is deeply subjective. The model is deeply
flawed and not necessarily a good sample, but I'm the only
model I've got.'' If he could bore into someone else's
heart, mind and soul sufficiently to find a moment to
represent, he would, but that's more difficult to arrange.

Willis's work is a development from the German
Expressionists, the Cobra Group, the Angry Penguins and the
painterly traditions of Arthur Boyd, Phillip Guston and
George Bazelitz. Boyd, who frequently works thick oil into
images with his fingers and hands, has been a major
influence since 1971, when, as a promising art student,
Willis was first introduced to Australia's leading painter.
Similarly in this series, the image is created in
conjunction with the way the paint works.

''They can take a long time to construct. The use of loose,
wild painting is intended because I want it to be alive. I'm
interested in the surface being alive and volatile -  I'm
trying to edge into new areas of language and part of my
vocabulary is that I want the paint to be loose, the
painting fluid, the paint thick, the surface painterly. I
want them to be not just images but objects, so that you
feel they are objects.

''I'm trying to make a picture which suits how I'm feeling
at any moment in time. Those inner thoughts that we feel
others would never understand - but sometimes share more
closely than we can imagine - are real thoughts and
everybody has them. It is the intuitive voice of the
passionate other. The human condition is laden with these
voices, rifled with these voices, but in the context of
social protocol, you don't say what you think and you don't
do what you'd like to do. And so as art, what I'm doing here
is giving the condition of the other a voice.

''And it's not just the ideas, it's also got a lot to do
with the technical side of getting the paint to work in just
the right way. And not lose it because an important section
has dried when I need the paint to remain pliable."

When you see a Gary Willis picture, it is not meant to
besomething universal. It is a specific statement. But that
does not exclude viewers identifying with the other voice
that Willis presents.

''They really become icons of the notion of the other. That
it exists. It gives space on your wall for the recognition
of the other voice that we live with. That's how they
function as art or that's their place as art. It's not a
very conventional place.''

Although Willis has been painting professionally for more
than 20 years, the energy and intensity in both his own
persona and the works he creates, makes it hard not to think
of him as anything other than a ''young artist'', albeit an
accomplished and experienced one.

In fact the term Young Artist is seen to refer increasingly
to an art movement, rather than chronological age. That
critical generation of the 1960s and 1970s when cultural
life was radical and vital has given way to a new
conservatism, unfortun-ately reflected among recent
graduates unsure of a direction to take after the  explosion
of style which began in the second half of the 20th Century.
Whilst waiting for the young conservatives to find their
bearings, the new art is still to be found with the Young
Artists Movement, where ''struggling'' and ''angry'' seem
somewhat more appropriate adjectives.

In his first showing in Europe since 1984, Willis presents a
distrubing series that asks serious questions about the
relationships between images and thought, real life and self-
percept-ion, as well as documenting in a most abstract
conceptual sense, his experiences over the past year in the
UK.

Many of these paintings are alive with a potency and
excitement of a single moment captured in oil. They ''stop''
in the photographic sense, the action, preserving the moment
of that inner or other voice. It's as if the pathway from
Willis's thought to the paint and the surface was a camera
with a very fast shutter speed, capturing in oil paint that
intellectual action-shot.


''Identification: specific'' oils on paper by Gary Willis
*  Cafe Pacifico, Amsterdam Opened by the Australian
ambassador to the    Netherlands, Mr Warrick Weemaes, March
29 to April 28, 1992
*  Actors Institute, London May 7-29, 1992

C   Copyright  David Langsam  1992/1997