Aaron Kinnane engages with painting in its purest form to perpetuate his effervescent vision of the natural world. Visceral layers of paint form sublime and atmospheric landscapes that are at once sullen and savage, bleak and beautiful, heavy and, desolate and wildly alive. The resulting aesthetic equilibrium spawns a purification that pushes the viewer beyond a physical and visual appreciation of the works into a metaphysical meditation.

The artist gives significance to form through a palette knife, eliminating, synthesising and ultimately modelling his abstractions. A restricted palette of hand-mixed mauve, grey-green, bone, violet and black form the visual language of the works, becoming both surface and object: their sides, their corners, the weight of the paint are as much a part of the work as the image itself. Through the multitude of topographies tacitly evoked, the works incite an ambiguous mixture of reverie and nihility.

Lavish layers of midnight navies, hand-mixed mauves, icy blues, arctic greys and army greens reconstruct impressions from the artist’s subconscious. The images appear as hazy recollections, revenant visions lingering in the liminal space between form and formlessness. Tempestuous, wintry folds of oil conjure stormy seas, snowy fields, rugged cliffs and grassy wilderness – atmospheric landscapes that oscillate between abstraction and representation. Bruised and scarred topographies exude feelings of isolation, yet it is a contented solitude that speaks not of despair but of hope.

Aaron’s long-time love of music is embedded in his work, the artist having grown up in Newcastle with the guys from Silverchair and travelled through India with Ben Lee and Missy Higgins. His new works continue this interplay between the visual and the audible, not only literally (Aaron always paints to music), but also tropologically – his palette knife like a conductor’s baton orchestrating different tonalities, from sonorous bass through to the feathery stokes of tenor. This lyrical language leaves the viewer to speculate their own truth based not only on what they see but what they feel.

For Aaron, the process of creating these paintings layer after layer was like traversing his own emotional landscape, since according to him ‘‘every emotional nuance felt during that time is now on each canvas.’’ Aaron completed a BAVA at Newcastle University in 1998 and he was an assistant to artist Sandro Chia in Italy from 2000-01. He has since been showing his work regularly in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and internationally.

(Text by Elli Walsh)