Visualisation

Animal House Fine Arts

21.6.24 – 13.7.24

Now that reality is preceded by images, ‘vision boards’ aim to manipulate a causality that commences in the virtual. Pics or it won’t happen. The transcendent stock market of wish fulfilment is super literal, so it’s best to be unambiguous: consumer goods work well. Images punctuate the ‘journey’ to some final destination: a skincare journey, an IVF journey, a fitness journey. The consummation of the journey is, of course, also an image. The perverse aspiration of influencer culture is to become an image: to cross over and subsist on the other side of the screen. Once you’ve transcended, you can beam out the icon of your perfection to the benighted leper-followers and sell them all the desiderata that made you a sage. Influencers are the hot spruikers of a death cult. This fixation with an individualistic and imagistic apotheosis is the complement of the present zeitgeist. We’re in the midst of a feverish millenarianism coupled with the withering of ‘society’ to its minimal degree: merely bodies on the same vessel. We are a raft of eight billion souls being sucked up the face of a towering tsunami that keeps gathering into itself and never breaking.

Tori paints the perpetual crescendo of a pending cataclysm.

The works in Visualisation feature symmetrical, central compositions. The eye has no liberty: you’re yanked in and pinned right at the centre of the painting. In the mind of a naïve painter, this rigid gaze stands in for the sensation of sublime awe. It’s a tactless, ‘wrong’ compositional trope, something like the earnestness of a Friday night Swanston street busker mightily demonstrating a purity of spirit that can tear through all the phoniness, but using devices uncritically derived from phony, industry-engineered soaring pop. Tori is not a naïve painter. Her paintings deploy this wrongness to expose the barb under the plush fantasy of culmination.

In Highway Hypnosis, the luminescent double unbroken lines lift slightly off the horizon, rhyming with the hovering eye the painting proposes as its point of view. The whooshing dynamism of astral projection is echoed again in Remote Vision. The acceleration in these paintings is facilitated by textbook one- and two-point perspective that addresses some disembodied transcendent cyclops. However, the fuel of this velocity is a reckless desire for something ultimate to be realised through the image. Tori amplifies the magnetism of this fantasy by further denying it. Her scratched up aluminium surfaces catch the light like the vandalised perspex of a bus stop shelter illuminated by passing traffic. Our sublunary bodies are on the outside of these totalising vortexes, trapped like flies against glass in a defaced and incompletable reality. 

Our apocalyptic culture wishfully confuses the silent immanence of the image for the imminence of an arrival. Paintings realise nothing and go nowhere; they are an unwrapped toy on Christmas morning without AA batteries. Visualisation is a confrontation with the thanatotic desire to enter the image. Through the portal, I think there are only two possibilities: either annihilation, or the complete cessation of change; a world trapped in amber, like a painting.

– Ann Debono, 2024.