Adam Southgate’s paintings are engrossing. Although populated with familiar images and scenes, there’s no easily-digestible narrative nor compositional simplicity that leads our eyes around the canvas in a pre-determined path. Instead, Southgate presents a kaleidoscopic collage of fragments: a montage.

With patience, it’s possible to separate these out and stitch them back together. See, for example, how the brilliant blue spotlights of a stage stretch across two fragments in Within Cells Interlinked (2021). Or notice how the three distinct lighting schemes and scales of the ear, the eye and the face in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2h 1 m) (2021) mark these selections as discrete. In Barton Fink (1h 56m) (2022), the duplication of a female figure sitting on the beach appears like a glitch, confirming Southgate’s cut-and-paste method. As they gaze toward two distances—the horizon line of the shore and the composite cross-section of Southgate’s making—their poses change ever-so-slightly, suggesting the passing of time.

Every artwork contains a suite of temporalities. This begins with time in the artist’s studio. Gestural artworks sing of spontaneity while realism conjures the snail’s pace of details and finesse. There is also the time an audience spends with a work, which contains both the pace of looking (hurried, absorbed, distracted, languorous) and a moment within the viewer’s broader life. Our experiences and memories of artworks intersect with dating histories, travels abroad, career trajectories and the late night conversations of post-opening drinks. Finally, there is the temporal distance between the two: the artist and the audience, creation and reception.

In this body of work, Southgate raises these temporalities to the fore and complicates them with the further temporalities of film. The artist eloquently articulates this when describing his paintings as “compressing the space and time of film”. Literally (and temporally) this compression involves re/watching a single film for each painting (most often directed by the Coen Brothers), searching for moments of heightened mise-en-scene. Southgate screenshots and digitally layers these. He embeds the earliest moments furthest away from the canvas’ surface, metaphorically mimicking our understanding of memory, where older recollections are buried beneath the new. Intuition, dynamic symmetry and strong visual elements guide his composition, which he then re/makes in paint. Close observation reveals the directors/artist’s shared signature motifs: a preponderance of lamps and light posts; recurring eyes that look out from the canvas to meet our gaze; and strong compositional lines borrowed from the built environment. 

The resulting works shift between their digital origins and material completion. They speak in both the visual language of the Coen Brothers and Southgate’s emerging artistic style. And they capture a film, as Southgate suggests, not through replicating its narrative, but by harnessing its aesthetic power. To extend this point: there’s an emotional intensity to the finished works, from the ennui and isolation of Fargo (1h 38m) (2022) to the hidden surveillance of No Country for Old Men (2h 2m) (2022) and the claustrophobic paranoia of Barton Fink (1 h 56m).

Finally, Southgate has included in this exhibition an array of works in progress. He describes these as an invitation into his artistic process and search for his artistic voice. Here Southgate reveals the literal layers of his painting process and spotlights the role of monochromatic colour within his artworks’ construction. Southgate beckons us to mimic the lengthy labour of their making and linger, a little longer, in this moment of spectating.

Adam Southgate’s 2022 Solo Exhibition: Within Cells Interlinked

Grey Street Gallery, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

Words by Dr Louise R Mayhew // @louisermayhew