“Ritual Groove” begins with the line and it’s through line that its works begin to speak to us. Freely applied in ways that suggest meditative ritual as much as unconscious automatism, the line here is embodied gesture or mark: continuous, repetitive, elliptical, broken to a stutter, erased to a shadow, the trace of its original impetus. By this it is divorced from conventional concepts of linearity. These drawings are not about ends, destinations, controlled process toward willed or determined outcome, but go and do as they like and feel, reminding us of the very material pleasure of artistic making. They go with eyes closed or open, to the rhythms of John Zorn, Nic Bartsch, Medeski Martin & Wood, JS Bach through simultaneity and ambidexterity, beneath and around authorial control, to the ritual site of their making, that echoes, in this case, Beletich’s long-standing interest in (particularly Japanese) line-drawing and the emphases of black and white composition on ideas of present-ness and absence. The elegant spareness and emptiness of these drawings correlates with questions of consciousness and their joyous deferral to material application.
This accent on line is perhaps reductive. Although secondary, colour also seems important. There’s orange and washed-out inky blue and pink and Masonite-brown. There are hints of green and lemon so subdued as to be only ambiguously present, even against their black and white surround. This brings us to another of the latent energies of the exhibition. The lines here are sometimes more definitive as recognisable shapes. The majority of the drawings are framed to the traditional dimensions (20” X 16”) of the portrait (another of Beletich’s favoured modes) and are often figuratively ghosted – as if an anonymous portrait or perhaps highly abstracted self-portrait.
In “Ritual Groove” Beletich brings us into the great and timeless questions of artistic making and production. These works are alive in the act of making, alive in their extemporaneity. They are having too much fun in their play to stop on the way along and assess their progress or validity. It is this energy that gives the work its freshness and intelligence.
Chris Brown
This accent on line is perhaps reductive. Although secondary, colour also seems important. There’s orange and washed-out inky blue and pink and Masonite-brown. There are hints of green and lemon so subdued as to be only ambiguously present, even against their black and white surround. This brings us to another of the latent energies of the exhibition. The lines here are sometimes more definitive as recognisable shapes. The majority of the drawings are framed to the traditional dimensions (20” X 16”) of the portrait (another of Beletich’s favoured modes) and are often figuratively ghosted – as if an anonymous portrait or perhaps highly abstracted self-portrait.
In “Ritual Groove” Beletich brings us into the great and timeless questions of artistic making and production. These works are alive in the act of making, alive in their extemporaneity. They are having too much fun in their play to stop on the way along and assess their progress or validity. It is this energy that gives the work its freshness and intelligence.
Chris Brown
