Doors Through the Ordinary

Lethbridge Gallery 20th Sept - 15th Oct 2024

To purchase see the gallery page

Catalogue text:

The new collection of paintings by Scott Breton "Doors Through the Ordinary" takes as its starting point a region along the D’Aguilar Highway, west of Brisbane.  This is a subject that many passing through might not even notice, the road weaving along a ridgeline between unassuming cattle properties and tired old gum trees.  But for Breton this particular area has sparked fascination since childhood.  It has long been earmarked for a series of landscapes, the forms of the ridge sweeping down and out towards sculpted ranges.

Certainly, there is a nostalgia here: implied paths disappear into the grass and over the cusp of the ridge, while the sun spotlights mysterious nooks of gullies, just out of view.  This place reminds of rising to humid school holidays, feeling excitement in the freedom to explore tracks through the bush, and to enter the worlds of imagination.  For imagination goes both inwards and outwards, and these paintings have been approached in an exaggerated way, weaving together light, space and atmosphere through the flexible elements of rolling fields, clouds and eucalypts.  They become billowing dreamscapes, inviting us to follow as they bend into the imaginal.  These are paintings about remembering the magical excitement of childhood in the mundane.  

Yet we also feel something ominous in these compositions.   Many of the pictures are filled with the dark and monumental volumes of storm clouds, a glorious threat unfolding like a time lapse flower blooming, majestic and terrifying, with torn edges around mysteriously thick voids.  The picture plane has been bulged and twisted, the brushwork in many places stretched and ragged.

In paintings that have both a soothing and an agitating quality, the question Breton offers might have to do with the tension between the anxiety and grind of adulthood and the spirit of imaginative excitement that we subconsciously recall from childhood and still secretly long for.   Both spirits exist, each arguing for their validity in a deeply uncertain (perhaps doomed) world that nonetheless needs our human capacity for imagination and the call to adventure.  There is both desperation and hopeful innocence to be found in these dry ridges.