PAUL MALLAM

Marrickville Streetview

“Marrickville Streetview” explores the relationship between physical place, landscape, painting, time, online search tools and the now all-pervasive nature of digital photography.  

Since the invention of the daguerreotype, photography and painting have enjoyed a dynamic and often combative relationship.  First viewed as marking the end of painting, photography liberated painting from the need to realistically record people, events and places, creating a new trajectory from Manet to modernism.  The combination of digital photography, data storage and online search tools has radically shifted that relationship, with photography now a ubiquitous medium, able to create an accessible digital record of every street in the Western world.  What is painting’s role, in a world where an estimated 14,600 billion photographs are created annually?  

Online search tools now enable us to experience “place” purely through a computer screen.  The 18 paintings in this series explore this online experience.  

However, by using traditional painterly techniques- visible brushstroke, non-local colour, framing and so forth- computerised views of place are transformed into works of imagination.  This practice also returns landscape painting from a plein air tradition to a studio-based tradition, but by using a computer screen as the source of the work.  By painting each work in 50 minutes, the works become a measure of time, emphasising the paradox that a painting always exists in the present, whereas as Roland Barthes observed in Camera Lucida, a photograph memorialises the past.  

For more of Paul’s 50 minute paintings, search paulrmallam on Instagram.

Image credit: courtesy of the artist