Opening: Friday 28 February 6pm
Talk: Friday 28 March 6pm
1 March – 29 March
Read the essay “Process, Protocol, and Intervention”
Photography Sam Roberts
Pictura ex Machina brings together paintings 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 sungod Helios sends down a golden chariot to rescue his granddaughter Medea in Euripides’ play, the triumphant Martian invaders are trumped last minute by a bacterial infection in War of the Worlds, the Great Eagles swoop in an pick up Sam and Frodo from the exploding volcanic Mount Doom.
Sometimes the Deus is a literal god, sometimes god-like, and sometimes simply highly unlikely. The Machina refers to the context within which the story is told: the theatre, the book, or 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 unexpected or absurd that it verges on the comedic.
Nietzsche rejected such interventions, seeing them as a betrayal of genuine tragedy—transforming despair as it changes it to false optimism and endangers 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 painter 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.
Sarah crowEST uses protocols to compose, develop, and conceptualise her works. In the exhibition we present “Seven Intelligent Blotches on a Sparse Grid”, a series that plays and reinterprets the constraints into an endless variation. Paul Hoban produces his works from the aleatorically created patterns: A4 pieces of paper, folded, perforated, straightened. The resulting pages act as a map, a plan, or a set of windows – formalising into traces or sections of his large works. Language derived from topological geometry further instill the works with a geographic and symbolic meaning that is outside of our reach.
Rather than divine last-minute rescues, Pictura ex Machina presents paintings that evolve through process-driven techniques and painterly “machines”—structures that shape, interfere with, and ultimately resolve the labour of the artist. Here, invention and intervention are embedded in the act of painting itself.
Please join us for the opening of the exhibition on Friday 28 March 6pm.
Paul Hoban is represented by Gagprojects
Sarah crowEST is represented by LON Gallery
The Little Machine is supported by Renew Adelaide and City of Adelaide