Rick Amor: New Paintings

By Andrew Frost

Across a suite of 14 new paintings Rick Amor returns to exhibiting in Sydney with a sequence of images that bear the unmistakable trace of the artist’s imagination. Amor is a painter who seems fascinated by atmosphere and ambience and his paintings, while having an almost cinematic edge, are also becalmed, rather like the moment before a storm breaks. Just such a moment is the subject of Terminal, a lone figure silhouetted and framed by a headland as looming clouds shadow the ocean. Other images, such as the Hopper-esque iPhone, picture a lone diner attending to the contemporary talisman, while Escalators depict a familiar but decidedly odd and even threatening threshold between worlds.

A number of studies, a self-portrait, a nude, and a trio of Australian landscapes compliment a larger scale work, the imposing Lower Manhattan, After the Hurricane. Where artists like Jeffrey Smart went in for dramatic lighting effects, gloomy skies and starling juxtapositions, Amor finds something different – a more surprising reality found in the familiar, a tantalizing mix of the recognisable with a suggestion of the metaphysical.

Until October 17

Liverpool Street Gallery, East Sydney

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