The Steve Cox exhibition Looking Back, currently being shown at John Buckley Gallery in Richmond is a bit of a dog's dinner. Whoever curated this exhibition should be hung from the rafters! There appears to be little thematic link between the large oil paintings and the smaller, softer watercolors. Indeed, the four watercolors that depicted people's heads were the most engaging of all the works and were reminiscent of the portraits in Cox's exhibition Witch Hunt (2009). Each of the faces in the paintings were macabre in some way and the eyes, painted with great skill exuded a strange sense of being. I would have been happy if these four watercolors were the only one's on the white gallery walls. Although my son (who was with me at this exhibition) immediately identified a kind of Mambo style meets Sydney Nolan in some of the paintings, I interpreted that particular mark making as a nod to the artwork of Keith Haring. However, there is something about the face studies that is reminiscent of Sidney Nolan's Colonial Head (1947), particularly in the way that Cox uses paint and emphasises the person's eyes. If you're in Albert Street over the next week or so to see the Sam Jinks exhibition, it's worth while dropping into the Cox exhibition, purely for the delight of seeing these four artworks ~ try and ignore the others, if you can ~ they just don't work!
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