October 5 - December 5 2022

Barossa Regional Gallery

11 November 2022 –15 Jan 2023

The Galleries, Adelaide Festival Centre

Curated by Suzanne Close, Curator and Visual Arts Educator and Leigh Robb, Curator, Contemporary Art, AGSA.

Essay by Suzanne Close

First published in Counting Days: Frank Grauso, with text by Leigh Robb and Suzanne Close

What does it mean to count the days for someone who makes every day count? Frank Grauso lives in the present, and his days are measured by his prolific output of iPad drawings. He aspires to capture the moment in his work, where the current mood is coloured by the accumulation of his lived experience and acquired wisdom. His academic training in Italy, personal connections within the art world, love of art history and European museums seep through the images as the past continually impresses upon the present.

We have all been counting the days since the COVID-19 pandemic. Our sense of time has been warped during lockdowns and quarantine. When I first met Frank, he explained that exhibiting this series would be his re-emergence from the pandemic. The seed for the project came from the posters Frank exhibited on a street wall when galleries were closed or at limited capacity. At the time of writing, ‘Blind Impression of a Clouded Vision’ 2021 can still be seen in the car park not far from Frank’s North Adelaide studio. The scene is familiar but just beyond the grasp of memory. The ambiguous blue shapes evoke the sense of two figures, perhaps lovers, in front of a blue clouded sky. I am reminded of Rembrandt's ‘The Jewish Bride’ c. 1665-1669, as well as faded family Polaroids. The textures reference traditional media like pastels but also retro computer graphics or early 90s music videos. As memories from my childhood, family photo albums, and a visit to the Rijksmuseum collide, I ponder whether the past, present and future exist simultaneously.

In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin argued that a work’s unique ‘aura’ was its ‘presence in time and space’ (Benjamin:1935). Grauso’s digital work is liberated from time and space due to the nature of the medium. There is no original, only a file that can be copied, transmitted and printed to various scales. With its anachronistic references, the work also encompasses all ages, from the current Screen Age to the Stone Age and all times in between.

Grauso visited the prehistoric petroglyphs of Valcamonica in Northern Italy as a teen. The elementary figures with incised lines and dotted marks left a lasting impression. Direct influences of these petroglyphs can be seen in ‘Shifting Fate’ 2021 where lines suggest a rudimentary animal form. Echos of hunting scenes are transformed into lively figures in works such as ‘Outlined Against Motionless Smoke’ 2022. Frank explained that part of his fascination with these carvings was the mystery surrounding their intended meaning or long-forgotten rituals. This seems significant in understanding Grauso’s visual language. It is the ambiguity within his digital images that opens them to multiple interpretations, allowing us to experience the present and project collective and personal histories.

The artworks in this book are the accumulation of Grauso's practice that sits within a long line of continuous work, from his studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in Udine and North Adelaide School of Art to his photographic work, paintings and experimentation with printing processes. There is an extensive knowledge of art behind every decision and mark made. If you spend time with the images, gentle nods to the art of the past begin to emerge. The reclining figure in ‘Leaping The Horizon’ 2021 is reminiscent of François Boucher’s ‘L'Odalisque’ c. 1745 but reimagined in fluoro blue and green. Other art references keep creeping in, including more contemporary sources. The worm-like forms in ‘Kafka Scape’ 2021 are reminiscent of the bodily sculptures of Franz West.

Figurative elements recur throughout the series, often in shadowy and obscured forms. Even some of the more abstract images seem to reference a human presence. A curve implies a calf or thigh, a sharp angle indicates a shoulder blade or crook of a neck. The posture in ‘Outrage’ 2021 reveals its own emotional language and internalised feelings left unsaid. This is in contrast to the poetic and evocative titles of the work. The phrases forced me to do a double-take and approach each image anew to find clues or connections of what they allude to. They simultaneously distract me from the image but also enhance it.

The written word is significant to Frank. This is evident in text-based artworks such as ‘Yearning Looks You Straight In The Eye’ 2022. Here, the powerful statement appears to have been scratched with the conviction of an angsty teen graffiting a public bathroom wall. Most of these digital works are a palimpsest of handwritten notes, layered with sketches on scraps of paper, photographed, and then over-drawn on the iPad. The initial photograph with biro marks is visible in works such as ‘Spending Cultural Currency’ 2022. Diagrams, daily chores, and reminders are also evident in ‘Stinging Riff And Lyrical Shiver’ 2021. There is a push and pull between the analogue and the digital, the hand-drawn and the digitally manipulated. The pile of drawings in his studio are remnants of the process.

At a cafe, Frank sketches the gallery layout and visually explains his ideas on a sheet of paper. I wonder if this page will end up as a base for one of his drawings. I sense that it is not so much about recycling or the transformation of the scrawled detritus of daily life but that all these notes, diagrams and lists are significant to Frank. These scraps of paper are records of the knowledge they once held. They are just as valuable as the finished drawings that also document the process of thinking things through. He explains that the images ‘come from somewhere else, you have to allow the universe to come in’. In seeking the essence of the image, there are elements of surprise and discovery, like solving a puzzle. The process is exploratory, where images are discovered through their annihilation. Frank explained this undertaking as ‘searching for the image through gritted teeth.’  He instinctively knows when he has found that elusive quality.

The iPad has allowed Frank to work with more immediacy. Unhindered by the preparation of traditional media, his mark-making contains a focused intensity. Entangled webs of tightly scrawled lines can be seen in works such as ‘Mystical Silence’, 2021. Scratched with a fierce velocity, harmony is restored in the compositional balance of colour and intricacy of layered marks.

Frank’s digital drawings seek the primal essence of things. Everything is reduced to capture the feeling within that moment. He draws with his finger in a rudimentary app and likes working within the program's parameters with its limited tools. Through their manipulation, brush strokes become barbed pixelated lines. The image is sliced and spiced together in new formations. Repetition and mirroring are manipulated in a way that only the digital medium would allow. The images glitch and mistakes are welcomed. The vivid neon colours overwhelm the senses. Through this malfunction, they become something new.

In viewing the 322 images in this book, my mind glitches from sensory overload, along with my perception of time. Returning to Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’, Douglas Davis places the onus on the audience, stating: ‘the aura resides not in the thing itself but in the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat, revise’ (Davis:1995). If time appears nonlinear when encountering Frank's work, it is because we have become unhinged in time and space. Like the character of Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse Five’: ‘All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.’ (Vonnegut:1969).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. ‘Illuminations: Essays and Reflections’. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. p.3.

Davis, Douglas. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995)’, Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 5, Third Annual New York Digital Salon, 1995. p. 381-386. Accessed 27’08/2022: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-094X%281995%2928%3A5%3C381%3ATWOAIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M 

Vonnegut, Kurt. ‘Slaughter House Five: The Children’s Crusade A Duty-Dance with Death’, Vintage Digital e. Edition, 2020, first published in 1969.