Alchemist in arts: DALE FRANK

Dale Frank's solo exhibition at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong

Dale Frank inhabits another world.

I am not talking about the reality in which he lives and works in Australia, an island paradise that remains detached from the broader international art scene. Or that he has chosen to make his home and studio in Hambledon Hill, a circa 1860 manor house on a rural property outside Singleton, a sleepy town in the Hunter Valley three hours North of Sydney. Singleton is where vineyards were first established in Australia, and today it remains a thriving wine making region. It is also home to one of the biggest coal mining operations in the world, and plumes of dust cloud the horizon as you drive into town.

Frank grew up in the Hunter Valley and returned here permanently about a decade ago. He renovated the mansion, which had been abandoned years before, rebuilt the gardens, and established a studio in which to think and paint. He collects stuff, mostly antiques, old ivory elephant tusks, and bizarre exotic taxidermy. His pride and joy is a sitting room off the original mansion kitchen that contains two polar bears, lions, tigers, a zebra, and a variety of birds and apes. The home is a bit of a gambit, contrived to seduce visitors, but gives context for his paintings through the way in which he collects and arranges things.

Frank paints every day, compulsively, starting a fresh painting each morning. He rarely finishes the work in a day, preferring to move on to any one of a dozen or so paintings that are in progress in the studio. It is more efficient this way, he says. He likes to work horizontally, the bases laid out in rows on carpenter horses lined up down the centre of a long, rectangular room with an uneven, paint-encrusted floor and single sliding glass door leading out onto a courtyard. “It’s starting to feel like I’m walking up a hill now,” Frank says about the layers of paint on the floor. The room stinks of paint, varnish, and silicon; you can taste it on your tongue, but Frank doesn’t notice the smell. He smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. 

Born in 1959, Frank is in his fourth decade as a painter—he had his first show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney going on 35 years ago. 1982 was his first show with Roslyn and he continues to show with this legendary Sydney gallery. He is famously non-communicative about his artwork and dismisses most (admittedly) shady critical rationales for his biomorphic, abstract paintings and found object sculptures. The titles of works are also no guide, providing little clue to his thinking beyond the fact that he clearly has a sense of humour and enjoys wordplay. But it’s also clear from observation and our conversations together over several hours that he has an insatiable work ethic and knows exactly what he is doing in the studio. “I go a bit crazy if I am not working each day,” he confesses, “It’s a kind of therapy.”

Frank is patient and cautious as a painter and yet also brilliantly bold and decisive in his actions. Decades of studio experience have taught him how his various synthetic and frequently toxic materials (including liquid glass, polyurethane expanding foam, varnish, blood, crystals, resin, silicon, Vaseline, crushed glass, glitter, acid, and copper sulphite along with random detritus) will react when alone or mixed together at different heat temperatures and on different supports. He is a bit of a studio alchemist, sure, but to him painting is as much a science with an intended outcome as it is intuitive alchemy. He edits his prodigious output ruthlessly with aide of a bonfire in a nearby paddock. This is the price of experimentation.

Frank has always loved to experiment with materials. His paintings from the past two decades show an artist restlessly experimenting with the aesthetic properties of everything other than paint. The biggest change is that today he has more or less abandoned the primed canvas and works almost exclusively on  Perspex. This may not sound that significant, but for the artist it represents a radical breakthrough in his work, and I would go so far as to say that Frank is making the best work of his long career: Letting go of the canvas as a surface, as a support, has freed him to explore the gestural, even sculptural potential of materials. Painting to him is no longer simply about an image but the realisation of a process, an idea. 

Much has been written about the transformation of painted images into words and objects in the late 20th century. I don’t think Frank today gives a fig for any of that deep art theory stuff, even though he has no doubt read it at one time or another. Nor does theory seem to have a direct bearing on his work: vineyards, cattle, and coalmines surround his studio and he seems very happy to live and work here. He is more interested in the fluidity of substances, what I would call the controlled and yet simultaneously chance-like quality of material juxtaposition coupled with an aesthetic appreciation of unstructured forms and blurred or hybrid colours. There is no abstraction or figuration here, only combustion.

Perspex is the key to the success of his latest body of work. The different coloured surfaces are calibrated to the materials he uses—mirrored surfaces for rare earth materials, crystals for blood, and a range of other colours for more textured, sculpture works in which the surface is built up with expanding foam, among other materials, and then sealed in a layer of liquid glass. He has also been experimenting lately with wigs, hair, and masks stuck on dark non-reflective Perspex surfaces, although to me these works lack the element of change, call it alchemy, in which an accretion of materials is magically transformed in the process into something else, something that is completely different, radical, and new.

This process of transformation is what delivers much of the energy and vitality in the paintings as well as their raw, visceral appeal. Take for example several new, successful works made with pigment, glitter or other substances mixed with epoxy resin, or expanding foam on mirrored or tinted Perspex suspended in a layer of shiny, solid liquid glass. Frank explains to me that he likes the way in which the materials react with each other, how different layers combine to give depth, and how the colours separate or congregate, and the reflective qualities of the Perspex, which enhance and multiply chance visual effects. This series comes out of his poured resin paintings of the past decade, he tells me, but won't elaborate more than that on how these works were made. He pushes back: “Why do you have to know all the secrets?”

A nose studies French cheese at 3 am, 2016, Compression foam, varnish hardeners, and colour resin on Perspex, 160 x 120 x 17 cm

Frank likes to work in series, with one series following closely upon another. “I take an idea out of other works and then create a new series and keep going,” he tells me. His use of Perspex evolved out of a series of works on glass, using acid, varnish, and pigment to mottle and etch the surface. But ultimately he found glass surfaces too heavy and fragile and switched to Perspex, which is lighter and more durable. The point is that his work is constantly evolving as he searches ceaselessly for ways to advance the idea of painting while radically departing from any painting conventions. Gone is the canvas, along with the paint, and even paintbrushes; Frank prefers to use knives, sponges, buckets, and even a house broom.

Frank has never been afraid of being branded as radical, different, and new. His whole career as an artist has revolved in many ways around pushing the boundaries of acceptability and taste. Some people find his work difficult, even offensive. I don’t. Neither does Pearl Lam, a pioneering dealer whose heightened sensibility to colour and love of radical individuality and originality in art have drawn her to Frank’s paintings. Like her, I share an admiration, no fascination for Frank’s recent work, the tough stuff, in which the idea of a two-dimensional painting on canvas is an echo, a marker of aesthetic civility gleefully abandoned in pursuit of an immaterial materiality. No rules, no regrets, that’s how these paintings get made.

Look at these paintings and empty your mind of all preconceived notions. You will discover that the new body of work is incredibly varied, subtle, and textured, such as a pair of paintings made of fire retardant foam layered over Perspex. When the foam is almost dry, the artist scrapes back the surface and it reacts to the oxygen and results in random, almost organic-looking areas of expansion and growth that bubble and burst outwards. For another recent series, he mixed potassium and plutonium with clear liquid resin, which he then poured onto Perspex and swept back and forth with a broom for two hours until the resin slowly dried and created sensual, flowing optical ridges. These paintings glow in the dark.

Grasshoppers as a term of affection, 2016, Varnish pieces in liquid glass on Perspex, 160 x 120 x 7 cm

The paintings made using Harlequin paint are among the most impressive. To begin, fire retardant foam is sprayed direct from a can to create thick crustacean-like blobs. He puts the paintings on the back of a truck he says and takes them to Singleton where a local panel beater sprays them with Harlequin paint, a special type of pearlescent enamel-based paint developed for detailing on dragster cars that is applied in an airtight room with a spray gun using multiple layers of colour. Harlequin paint gives an ultra-modern clean finish that shimmers and changes colour depending on the light. Paint pools over the bumpy surface of these paintings to a stunning effect—the colours fold, melt, and fade into one another so that everything changes from one minute to the next. Looking at the Harlequin paintings, your eyes never stop moving.

 
Leaving the studio, I notice racks filled with previous paintings on canvas and ask Frank how and why he decided to let go of canvas as a support. It is such a breakthrough for him and so exciting. He pauses for half a minute, looking thoughtful before shooting me a wicked smile: “You know you are going to die at some point, so you may as well do what you want. You don’t have to please anyone to sell anymore.”

—By Benjamin Genocchio

Benjamin Genocchio is a former art critic for the Australian newspaper and The New York Times. He is currently Executive Director of the Armory Show, New York’s oldest, largest contemporary art fair.

Dates｜18 January - 9 March, 2017      

Hours｜Monday - Saturday, 10am - 7pm

Venue | 6/F, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

  Follow us on WeChat by pressing the QR code to receive updates.