Does an artist have true agency within photorealism? Sydney painter Tommy Carman’s show Well Heeled at Mega is a simple exploration of memetic painting, using Carman’s distinctive photorealistic style meshed with the speckled textures of airbrushing to build a ‘rally’ of images.
Carman turns this unsuspecting garage gallery in the heart of Redfern into a retreat reflecting the artist’s more experimental side. The new Mega gallery space itself, with the tinted glass and half-visible office behind it, as well as its little particularities like the red fire hose and metal beams running across the ceiling and down the walls further add to a building narrative of Carman’s work.
On opposite walls are seemingly contrasting pictures. One side is a cloud of action, an airbrushed picture with flurried and hungry greyhounds racing, and the other is the uncanny stillness of a mid-shot tennis ball. The use of found images is highly mediated, mirroring the medium in which the freeing use of spray paint is restrained by the need to mimic.
There is a level of organic distortion: the cropping of the image is highlighted by the stark hard edge on the wall, in a constant play between empty pace and puffs of paint. Speaking to this, Carman revealed to this reviewer that he was “painting directly on to the wall, using its preexisting white paint as the highlights of the image by leaving parts untouched, opening the door to other avenues of attacking painting – namely how it could be absorbed into the architecture of the space”.
The mixing of medium and ‘canvas’ crystallises the image in its own ephemerality, the texture of the wall is its own medium as the paint dissipates into it. But that also means it’s easy to destroy and cover up.
The images also oppose in technique. While carrying this sense of hyperrealism, the movement and almost faked brushstrokes add a feeling of chaos to the greyhounds. The unpainted wall glimmers behind the layered grey, emulating the glossy texture of magazine prints.
It is almost as if getting too close to the wall would cover you in their flying slobber. The tennis ball and racquet on the other hand is so crisp, the background this time a blur of a shaded flowing state. Each speck of the wall becomes a fine-tuned pixel and the image itself an auto generated idea of what the scene should be.
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The show becomes more about the relationship between images: the greyhounds chasing the ball, a sense of competition or even constant chase. The relationship becomes a personal narrative between the audience and the image.
Tommy Carman: Well Heeled will be exhibited at Mega until 9 November 2024; the gallery is located at 14 Vine Street, Redfern, NSW.
