Racetrack - Gary Freemantle

25 April - 3 June 2002 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
‘If I were asked to condense the whole of the present century into one mental picture I would pick a familiar everyday sight: a man in a motor car, driving along a concrete highway to some unknown destination.’ J.G. Ballard

Gary Freemantle’s painting installation is a meditation on driving, looping in a continuous stretch around the gallery walls as if it were a slot car set. Racetrack operates like a multi-tracked synthesis of the vision and thoughts of one of its drivers, with the state highway rural landscape flattening out into one continuous, generic North Island circuit. Details of passing cars and landscape are framed as if caught in sideways glances through the car window, and together form a centre white line in the tarmac-like ground of the work.

Over the past century, driving has often been seen as a rich metaphor for modern living. Artists have used the highway to make a multitude of cultural and societal allusions, as well as visually linking driving with contemporary media such as photography, film and the computer (with its ‘information superhighway’).

The stretches of country between destinations have been a constant subject in Freemantle’s painting, from his expressionistic blurred roadside landscapes in the 1980s to the illuminated service stations of the mid-1990s. Racetrack develops these concerns, exploring driving as a space for contemplation - for thinking about our lives while catching glimpses into the lives of others (here a farm house, there a Porsche). Staring out at the road ahead - the white lines flashing rhythmically past - we might find our minds travelling back through our lives, with the profound and mundane mingling freely. In Racetrack memory burns like a rubber tread mark into the tyre-black ground.

For Freemantle Racetrack is as much about ways of living as driving. As if flashed out by the headlights of an impatient motorist in the rear view window, the circles and horizontal strokes that punctuate the work are in fact the dots and dashes of morse code. Translate that code and you’ll find a list of words (‘courage’, ‘empathy’ and ‘patience’, for example) which provide a litany of qualities to live by.

Racetrack achieves a distinctive interplay between snatches of figurative detail and strips of abstract ground. These two very different elements are meshed together by the strong rhythmic placement of the circles and horizontal strokes - reminiscent of notes on the stave of a musical score. While the snatches of panoramic view in Racetrack represent what most of us see of our landscape - the land stripped back for agriculture and habitation, with the ‘scenery’ far in the distance - their snapshot-like presentation reflects how we actually experience it.

Allusion is made to photographic and cinematic image through the way the markings in Racetrack’s ground recall the sprocket holes in camera film, and how, in its entirety, the work looks like a computer video-editing programme. Freemantle also explores how painting in installation can operate in some respects like a time-based visual medium such as video. Unfolding around the walls, Racetrack requires that the viewer physically walk the length of the work, but the transient sequences of figurative detail - fading in and out of the darkness - also suggest that the painting itself is moving past you.

 

Mark Amery