Big Chocolate 2004

Summary

Since the mid-1980s, painter Louise Forthun has been rigorous in her consideration of the city – not just Melbourne but many world cities – and she has created a prodigious body of work on the subject. Hers are not necessarily representational depictions of the metropolis and its structures, but (while clearly grounded in the real) abstractions that convey an essence rather than detailed substance of urban space. Using painstakingly cut and placed stencils, Forthun paints her cityscapes from intersecting and layered lines, planes, areas, shards and splinters of pigment and its inverse. The sense of estrangement created by her often fragmented and impressionistic glimpses of the city is heightened by their radical and sometimes shifting point of view, frequently vertiginous in effect. Such elements and effects are evident in her ‘Big Chocolate’. From its mottled brown-black base, a dense urban scene exhibiting aspects of Melbourne’s skyline emerges in white stencilled form. While the elevated perspective gives the viewer some visual mastery over the metropolis, any clarity gained is compromised by a feeling of the painting’s restless, shifting and unreliable ground.