Duncan Macarthur - Recent Portraits

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Duncan Macarthur’s art practice explores notions of identity and how the idea of an inner self can be registered through painting. Of particular interest is the psychological framework of how viewers perceive and organise visual information, especially when confronted with imagery where the mimetic logic has broken down and how this can inform new painterly language. Representation, irreducibly bound to presentation, is not merely a copy of something formerly present, it presents something new.

In a contemporaneous culture inundated with fast-viewed images, presented in an endless, palm-sized stream, painting, perhaps more than ever, offers viewers an opportunity to take a more reflective approach to the act of looking, one that  induces a deeper, more vital understanding of the subjects presented. This body of work offers the portrait as both an imitative copy, pushed to its rational limit, and a subjecting of the sitter’s subconscious.