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Silent Windows (catalogue essay), by Dr Wendy Garden, Curator, Maroondah Art Gallery (2012)

The exhibition Silent Windows was at Maroondah Art Gallery (Ringwood, Melbourne) in September and October 2012.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
1984 George Orwell

George Orwell's dystopia, as imagined in the novel 1984, is a city filled with telescreens. Written in 1948, the novel in many respects, pre-imagines the contemporary city of the twenty-first century. Today television, video billboards and LED screens fixed to both internal and external walls of commercial and domestic buildings, together with mobile screen devices such as laptops, computers, iPads and iPhones, merge public and private space blurring the division of here and elsewhere. New forms of media technology give rise to different modes of public behaviour as increasingly our relationships with others are mediated through screens. While the horrors Orwell envisioned have not materialized, a culture of surveillance has crept into modern living as more CCTV cameras and video screens around the city expand opportunities for observation. TV screens first migrated from the home to the street in the mid-1990s and soon colonized the squares and piazzas of town centres around the world. The convergence of screen and architecture that results, creates new portals for watching, indelibly changing the experiential space of the city.

Terry Matassoni's large-scale canvases respond to this moment. Life reduced to a spectacle in the screen terrain of urban space is depicted in many of his canvases. Rigid geometric forms pile up like blocks creating architectural screenscapes that expose the people within. Advertising billboards hover above desolate city streets portraying seductive bodies in cinematic freeze-frames; while illuminated windows morph into large, flat-screen televisions to provide glimpses of the everyday moments between ordinary people. Bringing together works over a twenty year period, the exhibition, Silent Windows, considers the psychogeography of the screen city.

Screens offer a form of vicarious living. Cinema, television and now digital screens promise connectivity with others but often deny real intimacy by estranging us from those physically near us. Many of Matassoni's paintings depict disengaged couples or solitary figures isolated inside their apartment cells staring blankly at televisions, laptops and computer screens. These works predate the fascination with watching the private moments of ordinary people's lives in reality television shows such as Big Brother. Reality TV feeds off the voyeuristic pleasure of watching the behaviour of others safely concealed and removed by the screen. Pivotal to Matassoni's body of work was an artist residency he undertook in New York in 1993. Having grown up in country Swan Hill the experience of living in one of the largest cities in the world had a decisive effect. Residing in a high rise apartment block Matassoni found himself drawn to the window fascinated by the juxtaposition of various domestic tableaux playing out in the incandescent fretwork of windows in the apartment opposite. The window is a transparent membrane enabling inside and outside to meet while remaining discrete. It frames a view allowing those within to look out, while simultaneously those who are outside see in. However at night this dynamic can alter to privilege those who look through from the dark. The illuminated window dissolves into a screen opening on to the lives of others. This was explored in Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window, 1954, and also the 1996 film, L'Appartement, by French director, Gilles Mimouni. Both films are set in high-rise apartment blocks where the activities of the occupants are glimpsed through windows. And both films exploit a voyeuristic impulse to spy on the lives of others. For Matassoni the effect was 'like watching several movies simultaneously – life was unfolding right before you while you remained invisible.' (Terry Matassoni in conversation with the author, 16 August 2012) Matassoni notes it was not so much the vicarious thrill of elicit viewing that arrested his gaze but rather the visual intensity produced by the pictorial matrix. A lattice of different worlds existing in one gridded space collapsed the distance between people while simultaneously enforcing isolation. The high-rise apartment block became a spectacle of discontinuous realities – a multiplex of miniature theatres stacked up and across.

This is reinforced in paintings such as The Apartment Dwellers, 1997, by the grid construction of the building. There is something inherently unforgiving in the regulated order of the grid. Described as 'modern art's will to silence' (Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, 9.) the grid in Matassoni's canvases cuts and divides confining the occupants within their cubicles. The disturbing nearness of strangers is kept at a distance through the vertical walls and horizontal floors that partition the people within. However unlike the modernist grid that set about banishing the human altogether, jettisoning any suggestion of narrative, Matassoni's grid reinstalls contingency, fallibility and emotion. The grid is rather an intimate space, but one that prohibits true unity with others.

Watching people can be a means of connecting with lived and inhabited experience conjoining us in a shared humanity. However witnessing, particularly when alone, can be an activity that heightens adisengagement with others. In paintings such as Little Worlds, 1993–95, and The World Outside, 2003, Matassoni provides a wide angle view that establishes the landscape's narrative. Into this he inserts a series of close-ups that spotlights the inhabitants. The zoom in/zoom out juxtaposition allows us to simultaneously observe many unrelated scenes. In these paintings it is not moments of high drama or intensely charged emotion that are privileged, but rather distilled nuances of gesture and pose that convey the ordinariness of those within. There is also an overwhelming feeling of disconnection between many of his protagonists. Proximity is no foil to estrangement. People's gazes do not intersect and couples sit wide apart, the physical distance between them intensifying their emotional alienation. There is also a sense of stasis in a number of his canvases – of time stretched out; of people waiting for something to happen. Many paintings from this period are nocturnes or twilight scenes painted in a mute palette of lonely hues. The evacuation of colour into the shades of night heightens the mood of quiet desperation.

This culminates in the painting Future Palace, 2002–03. In this work an overwhelming severity echoes around the deserted buildings. The only sign of life is a billboard depicting an averted face, the eyes resolutely shut. The articulation of space in this painting is reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico's Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914. The oblique angle of the buildings directs attention to the secluded street, while the restrained palette amplifies the austerity of architectural forms. In de Chirico's painting there is a sinister portent of things to come. The drama builds, the tension crackles.

In contrast Matassoni's image is devoid of narrative, instead it is a brutal emptiness that is threatening. In contrast a number of paintings have a more upbeat tone. For instance Modern Love, 1992–94, depicts an inner city bar filled with people who jostle against each other and grope for meaning. Amongst the throng is a lonely figure who anchors the composition. A woman stands at the window and looks out on the buildings opposite. With her back to the others she is together yet separate, present but absent, a reminder of the isolation that can be felt despite the nearness of others. A solitary figure looking through a window is a recurring motif in a number of Matassoni's works. For instance in The Spectator, 2002, a man sits alone in a stark interior looking through the window of his transparent box. In the painting Little Worlds, 1993–95, it is the artist himself who looks out of a window on the left side of the building. Mixing his paints, he surveys the scene for his canvas. Matassoni moved into his first floor studio in North Melbourne in 1993. Two large windows look out onto the buildings opposite affording the artist a privileged view. The window continues to provide Matassoni with visual fodder for his works. Two recent paintings, The Outcast, 2012 and Downtown, 2012, are responses to the observations of cafe life around him.

Not all of Matassoni's images depict the street. In a number of works the congestion of the inner city gives way to the wide sweep of the Yarra River. For instance in the painting, A Walk into Town, 2001, the dazzling blue of the water cuts through the middle of the painting dividing the buildings of the city from South Bank. What is most poignant about this painting is the separation between the two hubs of activity by the wide gulf of rippling waves. This is intensified by the figure in the foreground who stands on the bridge with her back to the viewer. More recently the four panel gouache, Bolte Bridge, 2010, depicts a sunny expansiveness. The large concrete girders of the bridge arch over the figures below. Bathed in daylight, people in this work chatter in the open air. There is a general sense of well being in later works such as this. Away from the huddle of buildings and the city's peering eyes, life is no longer a spectacle.

Also read: Silent Windows (exhibition opening speech), by The Honourable Paul M Guest QC (2012)