Untitled (Portrait) Painting

Oscillating between painting, film, performance and installation, Glen Stewart's art practice explores the dynamics between viewer and art work in a variety of ways, particularly how specific illusory and spatial devices elicit particular visceral or sensorial responses within viewers, audiences and spectators alike. Often combining a suite of elements, including large-scale video projections, coupled with acoustic elements (both real-time and pre-recorded) his works enmesh the viewer on multiple levels, creating potent and engaging works of art that address the viewer in a direct and sensuous manner. Recent video works, for example, have transposed or remediated historical illusionism, using digital effects to enhance, exacerbate and transform this imagery in order to deconstruct and examine the illusory power of specific works of art. These works have been presented as site-specific video installations that present or re-interface historical illusionism and transpose it into the realm of the digital. These installations create immersive and multi-sensory environments that involve the viewer, often attempting to blur or demarcate the barriers between art and reality, inviting the viewer to participate visually, spatially and acoustically. His recent paintings and works on paper also address the spectator's senses directly. Through colour, tone and texture they evoke various ethereal and physical/metaphysical associations. Often using historical painting methods such as egg tempera and oil painting, his works evoke a sense of history and time, built up over several layers that create an encrusted patina that is both textural and metaphorical. In his most recent boy of work, agitated verdigris surfaces are juxtaposed against areas of pure colour to produce an effect that is both soothing and immediate; where the viewer is drawn in by the surface textures and the nuances of tonal variations. These works have potential for triggering an array of associations - a tempestuous ocean, for example or other more abstract or otherworldly realms.