Raafat Ishak

These four paintings by Raafat Ishak were exhibited in 2017, along with one other, titled Acorn, and a suite of drawings undertaken collaboratively with Damiano Bertoli. Like Bertoli, Ishak is a Melbourne-based artist who graduated from art school in 1989–90, when artist-led initiatives and ‘kitchen table’ aesthetics were perceived as powerful tools for young artists. His collaborative projects and exhibitions over nearly three decades have foregrounded different forms of socially aligned art practices. In many instances over the years, Ishak’s paintings and their surface designs have unfolded from the stretcher or board, becoming schematic ‘instructions’, like blueprints or models for new installations and collaborations.

Each of the paintings held in the Monash University Collection is titled after an edible nut: macadamia, cashew, almond and brazil. And here begins Ishak’s distinctive word and image play, where meaning in his art flips deceptively between particular readings of signs and words – ‘hard nut to crack’, ‘tough nut’. The paintings are the colours of camouflage – earthy, forest-like browns, greens and grey-blues. In each work Ishak uses an architectural scaffolding or armature to underpin or ‘carry’ flat painting and precisely defined image silhouettes. There are partial representations of the Parthenon, a Mies van der Rohe villa, a half-demolished sports stadium and another anonymous building. There are the shapes of a camel, a Greek god, two female netballers, a military badge, an institutional crest and a Ferris wheel. Ishak’s decisive, uniform application of paint encourages us to seek associations between these components, but they remain unclear. Chance is a constant for Ishak, who uses collage in his art to establish unexpected correspondences and juxtapositions.

In Ishak’s world, different signs or words or things do, however, have meaning. My guess is that he still paints sitting at a table, perhaps no longer a kitchen table but nevertheless working serially late into the night, laying down flat blocks of colour, which he then highlights and outlines with thinner applications of paint. This slow, consistent method of working accrues a kind of density to his paintings. The collage process fuses images and ideas, and Ishak’s rhetorical negations – the inconclusive image association, the ‘empty’ spaces, materials like MDF registered in the negative (unprimed), or the lack of evidence of his hand – contribute meaning through irony. Macadamia, Cashew, Almond and Brazil account pictorially for equivalences, holding in suspension multiple forces and perspectives.

Ishak recently remarked in an email to me that connections within each of these paintings do not exist except as an ‘exaggeration of subjectivity’. It is a strange choice of words – the paintings certainly do not appear exaggerated. Ishak might simply be making the point that painting uses the resources of subjectivity in a heightened way, but he also knows how to parody the suggestion of excessive subjectivity. In doing so, he buys into the doubt and deniability that often accompanies attitudes towards contemporary painting.

Bala Starr is Director, La Trobe Art Institute, La Trobe University, Bendigo.