Essay for Pictura ex Machina
Eleen Deprez, February 2025
Pictura ex Machina brings together new work by Sarah crowEST and Paul Hoban. The title references Deus ex Machina — the dramatic device in which an improbable intervention resolves an otherwise unsolvable problem. The sun god Helios sends down a golden chariot to rescue his granddaughter Medea in Euripides’ play, the triumphant Martian invaders are trumped at the last minute by a bacterial infection in War of the Worlds, the Great Eagles swoop in and pick up Sam and Frodo from the exploding volcanic Mount Doom. The Deus is sometimes a literal god, sometimes god-like, and sometimes simply highly unlikely. The Machina is the context within which the story is told: the theatre, the book, or the movie.
In ancient Greek theatre, the golden chariot that rescues Medea was not an elegant ethereal vision but a clunky stage prop, hoisted by a crane swinging down from behind the curtain, airlifting the actor. The resolution of a Deus ex Machina does not come from within the story but from the machinery of storytelling: a seemingly external intervention. This moment of artificial resolution lays bare the underlying structure of theatrical illusion, making visible the mechanics of plot. At times, Deus ex Machina devices offer a dramatic and immediate ending to a tense or hopeless narrative; at other times, it comes so unexpectedly or absurdly that it verges on the comedic and breaks the enchantment of the enthralled audience. Nietzsche rejected such interventions, seeing them as a betrayal of genuine tragedy — transforming despair as it changes it to false optimism and endangering our metaphysical strength. I disagree. A Deus ex Machina device contorts our stories to the unexpected, from the mundane to the magical.
I imagine the artist straddling their canvas, having painted themselves perhaps into a literal corner: What to paint? How to paint it? How to resolve this composition? Where to place this figure? How to blend these colours? Out comes Pictura ex Machina: a resolution for painting not from the painter, but from the apparatus of painting itself. Like Deus ex Machina, Pictura ex Machina breaks through what is otherwise obfuscated: the artifice of art, the sentimental and make-believe of depiction. Pictura ex Machina shows us what is behind the making: it shows us process as part of the work; it shows us process as work.
The works of Sarah crowEST in this exhibition are made using structured painting protocols — personal sets of instructions that prescribe a process of making. These protocols dictate the actions of the painter while simultaneously opening spaces for uncertainty, doubt, and play. Rather than restricting artistic practice, crowEST describes the protocols as a boundless swelling starting point for a series of probing works. One of the protocols, Protocol 1 (2024), states:
+ a slight grid
+ 7 intelligent blotches
+ colours that simmer
(a title, a date, a location, an anecdote or quote)
What may seem like a restrictive formula gives rise to a cascade of interpretative questions: What constitutes a slight grid? How large should it be? What is an intelligent blotch? (And following on from there, what is a stupid blotch?). The works created under this protocol share certain affinities, but they also differ — each work having its own personality or temperament. Sparse is perhaps the most straightforward execution of the protocol: a pale-yellow background with a thin pencilled grid, seven smears of paint — at first glance squeezed directly from the tube, but their shadow and texture are a trompe-l’oeil. In Sometime I think, also Protocol 1, the blotches have manifested into seven faces; shadowy profiles from a portrait medallion, coin, or perhaps a quick sketch of a passerby. In Creeping Up On The Whitechapel, the seven intelligent blotches have turned into grotesque tongues that lick towards the centre of the panel.
There is in these works an immediate wit and visual playfulness. The works suggest an artist delighting in the act of making, creating out of a leisurely desire for divertissement (French: distraction). The crisp, minimal compositions with their relaxed and playful approach are deceiving. Turning the panels over — the privilege of the curator or prerogative of the buyer — one encounters something entirely different.
The backs of crowEST’s birchwood panels are obsessive archives — a meticulous record of each work’s making. There are layers of handwritten notes, printed labels, and stencilled years. crowEST documents every step of the work’s process: the number of layers of gesso, the type of medium, the order of actions taken. Some works contain hidden additions on their back: a pasted excerpt from a book, a quote, a biographical note. The full protocol under which a work was created is also included, sometimes showing the ticks as if the work was formally checked over by a bureaucrat. These details are not meant for casual viewers in a gallery; they are for the future archivist, for the work’s eventual owner, for the intimate moment when someone turns the painting over and encounters its paper trail. crowEST tells me about visiting a friend’s house and noticing an unsigned painting. “Proper painters” have, ofcourse, stopped signing their work visibly on the front; but even when crowEST turned the work over, there was nothing — no year, no initials, no title, not even an indication of which way up it was meant to hang. Works that only have a framer’s label give me anxiety, crowEST admits. By contrast, her own works leave nothing to chance. They are unmistakable, waterproofed against the erasures of time.
Alongside paintings, Pictura ex Machina also includes a few non-painting objects. Some are works in their own right; others are remnants of the painting process—sitting in the liminal space between art and studio clutter. When selecting works at Paul Hoban’s studio, I was drawn to a gelatinous, drooping shape on the wall — a cluster of hole-punch chads, glued together with gel medium in a slow, glacier-like coalescence. A grinning snow-head, sculpted from foam and plaster and covered in salt speaks to an older connection between the two artists: it’s a decades-old portrait of Paul, made by Sarah for an exhibition at the South Australian School of Art in 2002. crowEST’s Dub Freight cloths also form part of the exhibition. The cloths are part of a participatory project that began in 2019. These recycled fabric pieces resemble the paint rags used in the making of each work. crowEST invites feedback on their future life, encouraging people to use them rather than preserve them. Repairs and restorations are offered free of charge — playing again with ideas of provenance and authorship — emphasizing that wear, alteration, and continued engagement will only enhance their value over time.
Paul Hoban, like crowEST, embeds layers of process into his work, but his interventions are driven by aleatory techniques. His method for the Webwork paintings in the exhibition begins with a series of folded and perforated A4 sheets of paper, which are then unfolded and straightened. The resulting dot patterns serve as a form of mapping, an intuitive cartography that determines the structure of his larger paintings. These marks act as guides — windows, traces, fragments — that generate a layer in the painting rather than dictating a strict composition. Hoban’s paintings are “paint skins” mounted on canvas. The technique involves painting onto a plastic sheet — building up layers on industrial plastic sheets. Once dry, the entire paint layer can be peeled off, like the skin on a pot of cooled milk. This process creates a surface smoothness that is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve when painting directly onto canvas. The technique deconstructs traditional painting methods. Typically, marks build up in layers, with each new stroke partially obscuring what came before. In contrast, Hoban works and thinks in reverse: the first mark made on the plastic becomes the top layer of the final painting, floating fixed in its prime position. One could see the patterns and shapes in Hoban’s work as suggestions of space – a floating diagrammatical exposition of interstellar routes or pathways. But Hoban provides us with the following quote from Greenberg, suggesting that this kind of seeing-in is unfavourable – we should relish in the flatness of the works, their materialism.
“The picture plane itself grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface… interlocked or transparently imposed upon each other.”
(Clement Greenberg, New Laocoön in Pollock and After, 1985 p.43)
Hoban gives us several Word documents with quotes, drawn from literature, philosophy and obscure esoterica. Some give insight into a particular work, they are included in two appendices to this essay. For Sol4sol Hoban gives us this delightful quote:
“When Vincent Van Gogh had unluted his crucible, and cooled the integrated matter of the true philosopher’s stone, and when, on the first day of the world, all things were transmuted into the sovereign metal at the contact of the marvellous become real, the artisan of the Great Work contented himself with running his strong fingers through the pointed sumptuousness of his luminous beard and said: ‘How beautiful is yellow!’” (Alfred Jarry, Selected Works 1894 p.236)
The forms and patterns in Hoban’s work have multiple origins. The arrangement of circles and lines, as mentioned, are derived from the folded hole-punched papers. Other elements in Hoban’s work emerge from his reading on alchemy, mysticism, philosophy, and topological geometry. Scans from a 1972 book on elementary algebraic topology are cannibalised into the paintings too. Formulas and proofs appear as traces of text, their semantic meaning obscured. Sol4Sol one of the few works in the exhibition that has figurative elements, is a palimpsest of marks and drawings. The cone-headed frowning faces around the perimeter of the painting are appropriated from the cover of Alfred Jarry’s Song of Debraining. The lion holding an exploded star in its mouth at the centre of the painting is an illustration from Arnold of Villanova’s Rosarium philosophorum a 16th century alchemical treatise. Like the mathematical quotations these marks are rendered semantically mute, their contexts merged into an incongruous composition. I feel we are not necessarily tasked with deciphering the works of Hoban; we do not require knowledge of the complexities of homology or cohomology to grasp the nub of his esoteric paintings, for Hoban’s references and allusions are affectual as well as intellectual in approach. His technique and process is one of regurgitation revealing the insatiable hunger and drive of the painter. It is these characteristics, among much else, that the paintings make visible; it is here where we glimpse the Machina within Hoban’s work.
Pictura ex Machina presents paintings that evolve through process-driven techniques and painterly “machines” — structures that shape, interfere with, and ultimately resolve the artist’s process. Here, invention and intervention are embedded in the act of painting itself. The commanding work in our window, Namecaller, has, like an erased blackboard in a university lecture hall, thinly scribbled white markings across the surface. Dark, looming holes have been patched up by thick swatches of paint. The title suggests these holes are portals through which unaware passersby in the arcade are being insulted. But to me, these portals of paint call to mind Sarah’s blotches. Are they intelligent? I’ll ask.
Eleen Deprez,
February 2025