Hot Chips

Duration of the Show: 24 MARCH - 10 APRIL 2022
Location: PIERMARQ* / 23 Foster St / Surry Hills / NSW / 2010

Simply but affectionately painted in acidic, calcified tones, Craig Handley’s ‘HOT CHIPS’ at the PIERMARQ space is a touchstone of the Coastal-Australian imagination. In it Handley has championed the territory above our heads, behind our walls, in front of the water, our beaches, our pools.

Blue and orange plates of sky, field and colour give the works a very flat spatial feeling. Delightfully, there is an absence of ominous undertones in Handley’s most recent obsession with the Suburban-Australian experience; he chooses to celebrate spontaneity where others see conformity. Consider the work of Anne Wallace. While Wallace’s deeply moving style favours an insidious or foreboding atmosphere of domestic life, for Handley, the coastal-suburban Australian home is a vastly different place. Despite the clipped and sometimes acute perspectives in HOT CHIPS, I don’t get the frantic feeling that there is something lurking just beyond the field of view. I have no interest in sensing whether something lies behind the pallid window shades of his low-roofed homes, nor do I wince in anticipation of violence from the ocean that mother and son nonchalantly wade into. In ‘HOT CHIPS AND GULLS’ one peers out through the glass of a takeaway front. Inverted words, flipped and floating above a shoreline- a powerful yet voyeuristic feeling of retrospection and nostalgia. It reminds me that there is a safety in retrospection as well; in looking back through the membrane of time and knowing what happens next, which is likely an explanation for why there are no foreboding feelings in these works. In this way, Handley has offered up everything he needed me to see. His entire HOT CHIPS universe is before me, and he has made it clear he has no interest in reading between the lines, except of course, unless those lines read ‘HOT CHIPS’ (the two-word mantra we see appear in a total of six works - unsurprising considering his experience as a sign-writer).

John McDonald remarked in 2015 that Handley’s painting, winner of the Kogarah Art Prize, “kept growing on him” - a statement that I find deeply surprising when I look at HOT CHIPS.

Some artists are aware of the problem of false importance and pretentiousness and actively resist it, while others participate in it and expend a lot of energy cultivating this appearance. Handley quite playfully manipulates it so that his work may jolt us, most electrifyingly and notably in HOT CHIPS and his ‘Make Believe’ (2020) series.

Belligerently Australian, Handley has been weaponising icons and codes for as long as he has been painting, a definite nod to his prior success in animation. He has been known to frequent imagery such as clowns (both McDonald and circus-variety), men on ladders painting the clouds (meta-truman-esque self-portrait?), mazes; all hallmarks of the hallucinatory qualities of surrealism despite fervently identifying rather as a realist. I could talk about generic icons of fauna, lawn chairs, nostalgia, summer and all things Australiana, but this has been done before and there is a less-tiresome way I can explain why Handley’s work strikes a chord. It has a sense of humour. There is something to be said about a certain inherent wit that is stitched into the cultural appetites that makes Australians (and in turn, our collective aesthetic ) totally absurd. HOT CHIPS is odd in places where it is also homogenous. A lot of people would praise Handley for his ability to display the domestic atmosphere of every-day life and then continue to completely overlook his magical gift of weaving in the unexpected charisma of things not seen day-to-day as mere ‘decoration’. When the information from HOT CHIPS hits the eye it is so immediate, it summons a reactive scoff or chuckle from the body. When the scanning of a work brought forth the figure of a Don in a suit sinking a tin, announcing himself loudly in front of glaring areas of light and the too-recognisable suburban ecology, a smile was forced across my face. Everything is intentional, not discovered. Extremely constructed with nothing obscured. Needless to say, the works didn’t need to keep ‘growing on me’, HOT CHIPS told me of imaginary worlds so close they almost overlap. Strange icons crystalise between bile-toned alternate dimensions of creativity. Undiminished and childlike, leaving me squinting. When I look at Handley’s new work I behold a style that is empirical and bold enough to possibly jar the art world from its ten-year fixation on insular pseudo-abstractionist landscapes-about-landscapes.

Certain places seem to exist in one's mind mainly because someone else has made art about them. Written about them, painted them, shot them, filmed them. For me, Los Angeles belongs to Bukowski, Stradbroke Island belongs to Noonuccal, Miami to Barry Jenkins and Lavender Bay is Whiteley’s. A place belongs to whoever claims it the hardest, whoever holds onto it the tightest. For me, from this point onwards, takeaway fronts belong to Handley. This is a big call, considering the prevalence of such institutions. I say you can have this one Craig, it might not be a state or an island, but it is a domain that is near to me and has earnt a steadfast position in the Australian canon.

I should mention, there was a final thing that convinced me of this show's success, even though I was not left wanting. The crowning jewel for me was not on any canvas or board; I found it resting on the floor between two pieces in a corner of the Piermarq space. There I spied an unassuming single flute half-filled with flat champagne, indiscernible from a distance, but it grew on me as I circulated the room. Formidable proof of an exciting opening night for an equally exciting body of work. And that was all I needed to see.