Side one record no. 9

Over the past four decades Iacobelli’s multidisciplinary practice has employed both abstraction and figuration to explore the rich seam of human experience shaped by migration and its attendant conditions of longing, memory and the problematics of place. His often reticent, poetic and allusive work conveys the complex way by which humans continue to make meaning from objects and how these connect them to cultural traditions.

Iacobelli’s sensitivity to these questions has been shaped by his experience as an immigrant: he was born in Naples, arriving in Australia as a seventeen-year-old. Although Iacobelli trained in Adelaide in the 1980s, his art references the artistic traditions of Europe, in particular, his homeland of Italy, and Spain, where he lived and worked in the 1990s and 2000s. His visual language has been influenced by a wide range of sources, from the art of Goya, de Chirico and Morandi, to the early twentieth-century art movement Arte Povera.

This work belongs to the artist’s Side One series from 1991 and explores painting as an act of illusion. It emerged from a period of Iacobelli’s enquiry into the formal restrictions of the painting medium, specifically, whether he could achieve a sense of depth and figuration without representation. The almost two-metre-square painting, Side One, depicts a ‘still life’, of a vinyl record, which the artist has painted with a five-millimetre brush, building up the surface of the canvas slowly over many months. At first glance the work appears to be a pure abstract painting; however, on closer inspection, and under the right lighting, the painted surface appears as a close-up of a glossy black vinyl record, its grooves meticulously rendered in paint.

Maria Zagala, Associate Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs