Rodney Glick
We are all rich in Doubt
Goddard de Fiddes Contemporary Art Gallery,
2010
Overview, West and North Walls
photo:Tony Nathan
Extract from Review: RIC SPENCER
The West Australian Newspaper, June 18, 2010
In We Are All Rich In Doubt, we enter under an archway of crates (the ones the paintings where delivered from Indonesia in) into a gallery that was seemingly not finished before the show. By allowing the patchwork paint to show through Glick immediately begins to undermine the authority of the white space and therefore indeed any authority his work achieves inside this space. Likewise his works are raw, Philip Guston-like works that refuse to take on the seriousness of their own history. But beware, this does not mean they dont take on serious issues, like for instance religion, sacred geometry, sex, politics and for good measure the existence of God.
The ebb and flow of perceived meaning and any form of concrete realisation makes it difficult to nail the works down but Glicks paintings allow the easy flow of meaning to not get caught, nor indeed stabilised, while providing plenty of scope for self-reflection and analysis if you so desire. God, a blob of paint, Tobaccoland, written in cigarettes, Ode to Escher, a badly sketched continual cube and Stream all feel like flows of consciousness but offer up more then a fair narrative on the constant spiraling cycle of issues we face on a day-to- day basis, and the battle our mind has to keep up with environmental influences and philosophical charters that sculpt us.