Stewart Macfarlane: Riddles of Life

Still in full development and likely to become one of the most typical representatives of Australian figurative painting, Stewart MacFarlane is a notable contributor to the creation of an Australian identity. Dramatic, colourful, and sometimes shocking, MacFarlane's paintings uncover the intense human dramas that run beneath the civilized order of society. In a framework of stark realism - a realism where recognizable Australian cityscapes, superbly evoked, sum up all Western urban life - the artist suddenly lets loose a surreality of human gesture and emotion, a cryptic enactment that seizes the viewer with its potency.
Each of MacFarlane's canvases holds a self-contained design: a woman, or a man, or both together, at a moment in life when the dreams and desires of erotic love have sharply conflicted with reality. Each canvas thus highlights a typical problem of modern sexual relations. But assessed as a group, these pictures go even further, for they span the entire socio-psychology of contemporary life.

Veronique Helmridge-Marsillian lectured at Sydney University in the Department of Germanic Studies.