“The Aboriginal culture, old of 30 to 50.000 years, is certainly the oldest in the world and the Aboriginals of Australia perpetuate it today through their forms of art” Richard Kelton of the Foundation Kelton, Los Angeles.
“Our Dreams are truly important for us, our lives and to teach our families the traditions of the life. To know the Dreams of the father, the mother and of the grandmother. ”
Jeanie Nungarrayi Egan, Yuendumu

To approach Aboriginal painting under the only ethnographic angle with the curiosity of the traveller is not enough. Admittedly the knowledge of the Australian “Dream”, privileged vehicle of a culture and a life science particular to the desert, is necessary but beyond it is with an original pictorial phenomenon under its richness, its variety and its conditions of creation, that we are convened.

Traditional representation, in pigments deposited in the sand of the desert, of their history and their territories, the Aboriginals passed to perennial creations to the acrylic resin on canvas.
The change of supports and pigments caused, in the respect of the sacred character of the inspiration, works that the world discovers since the Seventies with astonishment and enthusiasm.

In the CLEMENT Gallery, hung vertically, the visions of the Australian “Dream” invite to aesthetic reflection renewing the immediate interest for pointillists abstractions and gestural.
Let us point out the framework of creations. Under a venerated tree or in big rooms, on the ground, the Aboriginals paint with the brush held vertically as for Chinese painting. Sinuous trajectories, closed forms launched without draft weave networks or are covered with an infinity of points of colors. Certain paintings are only structured by points of varied nuances and intensity, ultimately giving the aspect of a floral tapestry or of a constellated sky.
And the European, accustomed to analyze painting with references of the history of art, will speak about “abstract pointillism”. But how much we are far from a Seurat or of a Signac!
The composition in points reveals remote volumes, depths, even of the secret tracks, unperceivable condensations. The desert that the Aboriginals represent thus is a territory where each flowering, each relief of ground, each hole of invisible water is in charge of vital direction. The tracks of the animals, the shrubs, the medicinal plants and water have a practical and crowned importance.

Are we then in a topography “seen of the sky” as suggest by the parallelization with the air sights taken at low altitude ?
There still, the reference to a concretely apprehended reality leads to a dead end. Because the symbolic system of Aboriginal painting does not have any guarantor in our language as well geographical as aesthetic. This is even truer for paintings offering concentric solar forms or linear forms rhythmed.

“These artists have a peripheral vision of the world. The traditional paterns have neither up nor down and must be seen and understood on the ground.” Geoffrey Bardon

It is thus about taking out the glance of all associations of ideas stylistics, ethnographic or realistic. We are in the presence of a form of art “all other” whose intrinsic quality is apprehended then as an original artistic movement which reaches us in all the purity of the inspiration of true creators.
We remain captivated by freedom and the pictorial richness of artists having like reference only their own history, their territory and their intuitive knowledge of the secrecies and the resources of the desert.
If at the beginning and still currently, it is a question for the painter of perpetuating the memory of its community and of maintaining alive the relations which it maintains with nature, paintings are for the Western visitor a mystery where the term even of beauty seems inadequate or at least insufficient.
The profusion of reasons and the colors, the representation which one will qualify too quickly naive landscapes and animals, are essential first of all in the astonishment and silence.
There is in the glance which we carry something of similar as what we feel of an Indian Mandala or of Navajos and Hopis paintings. A distance and an enchantment from the eye who leads in mystery.

Mireille Callu (April 2007)