Fallen Angels and Divine Starships        

I once described Wayne Brookes as physically resembling Damien Hirst’s big brother, but I now feel I should instead have been drawing parallels with that time traveller extraordinaire, Dr Who. With a supercharged brain instead of a Tardis, Brookes segues through time and space, paintbrush in hand, with an ease and a freedom that is quite remarkable. Personally, I would like to see his astonishing canvases travel through space, more than through time, to galleries and museums in Berlin, London, and New York, and I am confident this will happen.

Steven Joyce, his gallery dealer of many years, speaks of “The Brookes Phenomenon”, and I can’t argue with that. When he is not making art, he is looking at it or enthusing about it with his students and his friends.

Then there is the more reflective, scholarly side, to the phenomenon, when he is thinking hard and writing elegantly about his research topic, as in this passage where he describes the adventures to be enjoyed beneath an archetypal domed canopy:

“The space beneath this canopy encourages the navigation of personal agendas. The ocular encounter is merely the beginning of the adventure. While the extreme focal opus can be unbalancing, the codes are consistent; power radiates hierarchically from the centre earthwords, right down to your foot on that rung. The optical collision between architecture, stucco and anamorphic device begins my narrative…it is collage, it is abstract realism, it is awkward and it is confusing…”

Wayne Brookes has the confidence of a celebrity chef, throwing masterpieces together in a seemingly effortless way – a little bit of Versailles here, a twist of humour there, and a heavy dose of the macabre to spice up today’s special. Pretend you are lying on your back, looking up at these architectural panoramas and listen to Wayne whispering in your ear about fallen angels, naked cosmonauts, and divine starships. “It is all a litany to Las Vegas,” he tells you. “Where God will inevitably be Liberace.”

I once asked Wayne to explain a term he often uses – “Ocular Gush”.

“I recognise that my replications are only postcard facsimilies of the actual space,” he says with some modesty. “But I look on them as a sort of Chinese Whisper, full of quotations that can be interpreted and misinterpreted by the viewer. I see the Quadratura awning existing in a parallel slipstream to the digital annexe of the Imax.  And because the material I use is acrylic, I assume that I’m actually a plastic surgeon.”

It has been an intriguing journey, these past eighteen years, since Wayne Brookes’ first exhibition “Disgraceland” at Despard Gallery. The stations of his own personal cross have moved with the speed of a Cadillac, rather than a donkey or a sandalled Messiah. Many who see this exhibition will remember his past obsessions with Caravaggio, Artemesia Gentileschi, and her great work Judith and Holofernes. Look up at these domed ceilings and wonder what will come next.

Peter Hill is a Glasgow-born Australian artist and writer. He is Head of Painting at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His book Stargazing: memoirs of a young lighthouse keeper won Scotland’s main literary prize – a Saltire Award – for best First Book of the Year in 2004.