Michael Portley
Counterpoint
Michael Portley’s new exhibition, Counterpoint, is comprised of a series of representative and interpretative landscape paintings that focus on controlled and constructed environments. In Counterpoint Portley romantically depicts ordinary, and even unsightly, places in a magnificent light whether that be a non-descript local park, the wounded earth from mining or a landscape denuded of trees. Portley imbues beauty in these subjects through pattern, colour, multiple light sources, as well as conflicting modes of painting and points of perspective.
With a thinly disguised sense of irony in some of the works, cryptic metaphors of a transforming landscape are brought to the fore with notions of mining, for example, as a process of gouging the earth and searching for advantage. Notions relating to human interconnectedness and society are also present in the works often expressed through Portley’s anthropomorphic rock formations or tree subjects. While these ideas are present the artist does not cast comment but allows the paintings to set the arena for layered themes.