Recondita Armonia – Strange Harmonies of Contrast

Andrew Frost

The late painter Jeffrey Smart took the style of figurative Surrealism and removed the political hokum, ending up with an astringent and unsentimental view of the world, but one that also retained the unique and uncanny beauty of the modern city. Smart, an expat Australian who spend many decades in Italy, suffused his vision with the concrete of the autostrada and tower block, the signage of the petrol station and the eye of a poet. Smart created an odd and individual style that was highly regarded when he died in 2013 aged 92.

Curated by the novelist David Malouf, who Smart once famously painted as an overalls-wearing sewerage worker, Recondita Armonia – Strange Harmonies of Contrast shows “…some of the ways in which Jeffrey Smart transforms the made objects of urban landscape – roads, traffic signs, unit-blocks – into visual poetry, into memorable images that reveal to us the strange harmony of contrasts, ‘Recondita Armonia‘ of the world around us.”

Until March 7

University Art Gallery, Sydney University

http://sydney.edu.au/museums/exhibitions-events/jeffrey-smart.shtml

Pic: Jeffrey Smart, Night Stop, Bombay, 1981 [detail]. Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas.