Aaron Kinnane: Winter Passing, Milk Moon Rising

Following his selection in the 2015 Wynne Prize, Sydney-based artist Aaron Kinnane presents an exquisite new collection of oil paintings at Arthouse Gallery in November.

Aaron Kinnane engages with painting in its purest form to perpetuate his effervescent vision of the natural world. Visceral layers of paint form sublime and atmospheric landscapes that are at once sullen and savage, bleak and beautiful, delicate and bold, desolate and wildly alive. The resulting aesthetic equilibrium spawns a purification that pushes the viewer beyond a physical and visual appreciation of the works into a metaphysical meditation.

‘Winter Passing, Milk Moon Rising’ continues the artist’s exploration of the suggested landscape. Lavish layers of midnight navies, hand-mixed mauves, icy blues, arctic greys and army greens reconstruct impressions from Kinnane’s subconscious. The images appear as hazy recollections, revenant visions lingering in the liminal space between form and formlessness.

Moving away from the singular viewpoints of his last series, Kinnane’s new paintings vary in perspective – from the sublimity of soaring heights to the intimacy of ground level. Tempestuous, wintry folds of oil conjure stormy seas, snowy fields, rugged cliffs and grassy wilderness – atmospheric landscapes that oscillate between abstraction and representation. Bruised and scarred topographies exude feelings of isolation, yet it is a contented solitude that speaks not of despair but of hope. Using his palette knife as a material extension of his psyche, Kinnane effaces and rebuilds his forms, breaking down planes, pushing horizons and morphing shapes. These paradoxical moments of raw intuition and analytical precision conjure an energy that is at once wildly emotional and quietly cathartic. This is the singular power of Kinnane’s paintings – their propensity to invoke, simultaneously, a spectrum of emotions spanning melancholia to ecstasy. 

Kinnane’s long-time love of music is embedded in his work, the artist having grown up in Newcastle with the guys from Silverchair and travelled through India with Ben Lee and Missy Higgins. His new works continue this interplay between the visual and the audile, not only literally (Kinnane always paints to music), but also tropologically – his palette knife like a conductor’s baton orchestrating different tonalities, from sonorous bass through to the feathery stokes of tenor. This lyrical language leaves the viewer to speculate their own truth based not only on what they see but what they feel.

Kinnane completed a BAVA at Newcastle University in 1998 and he was an assistant to artist Sandro Chia in Italy from 2000-01. He was a finalist in the 2015 Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and shows his work regularly in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and internationally.