Jordan Marani’s Colourful Language

Posted by Natalie Thomas on November 24, 2014 in Australian Art, Melbourne Art | Leave a comment

“Just because you swallowed a fucking dictionary when you were about 15, doesn’t give you the right to pour a bucket of shit over the rest of us.”

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating (to Jim McClelland)

Gee I miss Paul Keating. Not the older recent ‘I did that, that’s my idea’ Paul Keating. The younger, hungry Paul Keating who would get wound up and go off like an out of control rocket. In Parliament. You’d watch him go, spilling forth a fury of disdain and frustration and go: ‘If that ain’t showbiz I don’t know what is!’ All hail the Banana Republic!

Art is showbiz too (though it often wishes it wasn’t). Art wants to exist in a more rarefied space, one where Opening Night doesn’t make you or break you, the audience expose their philosophy through what they like and what they don’t like and you stand round, sipping prosecco watching the show. Jordy’s audience sure likes to swear. A crew of intriguing aging rockers, ones with battle scars and bar stories aplenty, came together Saturday afternoon to watch Jordy go off like the die hard Keating fan he is.

F***, shit, hope, hell, cock, dead, dumb, piss, heap, arse, c**t, ball, bags, sick, hole, sake, sexy, bull, tail, pigs.

Four lettered expletives kept coming, slowly emerging from within a camouflage of pretty triangulated pastels. There’s a lot of ruler work and a suspicion, that beyond the disorder there’s a seeking out of rules. Order.

I don’t believe for a minute, the whispers that someone has been locking Jordy up in his studio and not letting him out till another handful of canvases are complete. It’s one possible answer to the prodigious output though: 55 new canvases in 3 months and a lot of swear words and swear word combinations. I know the real reason for all the new work though. It’s because Jordan has something to say. It ain’t all pretty.

15 October-15 November 2014

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