Gurvich creates his own visual music

Arthur McIntyre, from Nothing but Blue Skies

There is an orderliness about the early work of Rafael Gurvich which prevents even his most self-indulgent and seemingly spontaneous paintings from slipping over into visual chaos. A background in architectural studies, as well as fine arts training at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and a peculiar way of seeing the underlying structures common to all things accounts for this sense of control.

The expressionistic aspects of Gurvich’s approach to art are real enough, but consistently tempered by a commendable disciple, revealed in other areas of Gurvich’s life, such as his printmaking, limited edition bookmaking, poetry and commercial framing activities.

Even in his early paintings, such as Baby Rachel and Baby Estelle, both painted in 1972, Gurvich’s expressionism is held in check by the challenge of composing for a square format. The heads of the subject appear almost bloated as they reach out with rotund fulsomeness to fill the squares in which they are so snugly contained. There is a fondness in these portraits, but this is accompanied by gentle satire. After all, a chubby baby’s bald head, all pink and fleshy, is a rather comical sight, even to the most doting of parents.

What is conspicuous in the early works is a bold sense of composition, an unusual feeling for the emotional connotations of colour and a powerful tonal interplay. Unlike many artists who enjoy lavish displays of colour, Gurvich has never been seduced into employing colour at the expense of comprehending its value tonally. Gurvich’s colourful paintings hold their own magnificently when they are reproduced in black and white. His sure sense of design and tonal manipulation is blatantly obvious in his monochromatic prints.

Use of architectonic break-ups as a structuring device often in the form of repetition of specific units, is hinted at from an early stage in the artist’s career in works such as Khorshed, 1974, another portrait, but in this case one which shows an adult female sitter, complete except for her feet, which are severed at the bottom of the picture frame. Distracting elements, including a strong blue background and a vivid red chair, fail to prevent the viewer from being drawn to the sitter’s face, which looks poignantly out and beyond the viewer’s left shoulder. The structural devices are simple in their echoing of the rectangular working format and provide a fitting solution to the problems of placing the figure centrally, anchored to one edge only.

Nude and Still Life. 1975, once again, uses a grid device, most conspicuously in the composition of a window frame in front of which selected objects are grouped , including a female nude, sturdy and pink, adjacent to an area of pungent bottle green in the top right-hand corner. Some of the objects are difficult to recognise because Gurvich has taken some liberties with form and colour in order to heighten his visual dynamics. A sculptural Easter Island type head in the lower right-hand section of the composition is reminiscent of tribal artefacts and possesses a vaguely Cubist quality.

This distorted head, divorced from the rest of the body, recurs in later paintings including Pelican Conversation, 1978. vertical and horizontal divisions help anchor two centalised heads, one human, the other bird, to the rectangular format. In the paintings of the late 70’s, Gurvich is more subdued in his use of colour, “dirtying” up his palette in a way which reinforces an undeniably anguished emotional content. In some ways the images of this time are like the theatre of the absurd, which while making us laugh, makes us feel uneasy. While man talks to the birds, an ambiguous form to the left of the painting resembles both a leafless tree-trunk and an elegant, beckoning, gloved hand.

A brooding intensity pervades other paintings of the late 70s, such as The Pious Couple, 1977, where stylised figures assume some of the characteristics of department store mannequins or mechanical robots. A dark cloud appears to hover over Gurvich’s vision at this time, creating a moody resonance. Max Beckmann’s ghost wanders past Gurvich’s figures who display symptoms of alienation, possibly induced by the pressures of urban survival.

The multi-unit Blue Heads in Conversation, from 1977, extends the concept of Pelican Conversation by placing images of the human head (strangely decapitated) in a stylised environment of animal and plant life. It is as if Gurvich is trying to express his wish to return to nature in order to communicate a more “real” existence, The unsettling edgy quality of the late 70s works is probably a reflection of the artist’s own state of mind at that stage in his life, because Gurvich’s work is nothing if not diaristic.

Music is extremely important in Gurvich’s life, as is travel. Everyone Should Listen to a Strauss Waltz, 1979, reveals a happier vision of the world by an artist who is obviously solving problems and removing unnecessary sources of tension and confusion. The pared down composition expresses a harmony with life, akin to that which we find in such life reinforcing music as a Strauss waltz. This idyllic scene depicts man in happy unison with plants and animals dancing to the rhythms of life.

By 1983 Gurvich’s paintings are brimming over with colour, and bursting with “joie de vivre.” A Poetry Reading in the Night Sky, 1983, is a symphony of symbols rejoicing in a floating world, free from earthly binds. The heavens sing and dance with a Chagall-like fervour.

Animal and plant life tends to take precedence over human life in Gurvich’s work from the middle 1980’s to the present, although human beings make occasional appearances, playing minor roles. Life in the country, minding a friend’s farmlet, has provided Gurvich with a plethora of stimuli. Ten Years of Travel in a Floating World, 1984, is an immensely complicated painting which is really a dozen paintings in one. It is as if the artist has placed numerous works on the floor of his own studio and has sprouted wings, flying above a world of his own creation to present us with an astonishing bird’s eye view.

Gurvich defies traditional Western notions of perspective and illusion on a two dimensional surface to give us a painting which can be read up the canvas or from left to right. The influences of Eastern landscape artists and calligraphers are in evidence, although Gurvich’s use of colour is peculiarly Eastern European, with echoes of Russian innovators, such as Kandinsky, who also married art with music.

In The Joy of a Warm Current, one floats or swims in sensory delight sharing the feelings of a multitude of life forms.

An almost child-like innocence and sense of wonderment manifests itself time and time again in the paintings of recent years. Occasionally, the works border on the saccharine and the sentimental. Gurvich’s fertile powers of imagination save the day. He reworks his weird and wonderful symbols as endless variations on a theme of life, just as the great composers do. People, plants and animals undergo strange and unlikely types of metamorphosis. Everything appears in a state of flux.

But I think the intimate nature of most of Gurvich’s work is often best conveyed on a small scale. The most memorable paintings are often quite tiny and when shown successfully in juxtaposition with other small works, a wholeness of vision is conveyed. Sometimes, the larger paintings appear to have too much happening in them for the viewer to comfortably digest the wealth of colour and incident.

The moon, the sun, the stars, suspension, flying, floating on water – these are the components of a great deal of Gurvich’s 80s creations. Direct and perceptive observation of life results in infinite variety, but there are occasions when direct observation seems to have been filtered through dreams and a poetic sensibility.

And wit abounds. In Tour Group #2, 1986, it is as if a group of tourists on a toy-land train or bus has collided suddenly with a museum full of Kandinskys!

The rewards of a secure family life and the pleasures of simple displays of affection are recorded in Gurvich’s passing parade of images, such as those in Images for the New Year, 1986, and A Love made in Heaven, 1986. His art is a homage to the virtues of friends, children, lovers, and pets, all as one and at peace with the earth, the rivers, the seas, the mountains and the stars, moon and sun above.

Looking at a Gurvich painting such as Out on the Prowl, 1986, one suddenly enters the world of the animal and instinctively knows what it must be like to go out on the tiles and bay or miaow at the moon, or another furry four-legged creature. He makes it very easy for us to enter his realm of magic and fantasy.

A riotous vitality overwhelms the viewer in much of his most recent output, such as Give the Dog a Bone, and Riding the Air Thermals, both 1987, and a fluid use of paint activates surfaces even more than previously. One exception is the more minimalist Young Lovers, 1987, which is remarkable for its air of comparative calm. The frenzied energy of most of Gurvich’s paintings is replaced by a composition in which only three symbols vie for our attention against a dark, velvety background. There are links here I think with the work of the middle and late 70s.

Background and foreground often merge in the very recent paintings, which no longer depend on grid devices or rectilinear breakups. More risks are being taken and in paintings such as Early Morning Chorale. 1988, all the shackles are removed. This celebration of life is positively manic in its swirling rhythms and richly applied colour. It’s all up, up and away!

In my view, the most significant features of Gurvich’s art include: a defiantly individualistic approach free from fashionable modes of expression, a concern for natural phenomena and the humanist tradition, intimacy of subject matter (often scale as well), the development of a personal repetoire of signs and symbols, a spiritual relationship to all living things, a whimsical, satirical form of humour, the use of colour as tone and to express mood, a desire to create harmony as a form of visual music and a consistent move away from youthful uncertainty towards a mature celebration of life in all its manifestations. Real freedom of expression has been attained.

Arthur McIntyre has been Sydney art critic for “The Age” since 1980. He is an artist and teacher and curator of The Age of Collage, 1987, and Oz Drawing Now, 1986. his book Australian Contemporary Drawing (assisted by the VAB/Crafts Board) is published by Boolarong Press, 1987.