PAINTING

The strength of Coady’s paintings lies in their lack of didacticism and their preference to emphasise the raw application of colour. It is no surprise that the work (and life) of Julian Schnabel is a guiding force for the artist, but not exclusively.

Coady’s paintings are works which do not seek to hector us into joining the camp of some political faction, in alignment with the dictum of a recent Director of the Sydney Biennale: Art should only pose questions. It should not answer questions. It is propaganda that presents straightforward and simple answers.

Internationally, contemporary female expressive painters have returned to prominence, among them Amy Sillman, whose achievements Coady admires. Mark Godfrey, Curator of the Tate Modern observing that the work of such artists and specifically their engagement with composition, agency, intention and other ‘erstwhile taboos’ have made them ‘central to the art of today’, and further, that these artists, in their different ways, have departed from the authentic gesture of mid-century painting and the emptied postmodern gesture. Instead, their canvases are populated by the uncertain, fake or unlocatable.

Each of these artists, like Coady, is on record critiquing the idea of a unitary author and/or the development of an obvious signature style, preferring to subscribe to the use of materials and the selection of images which reflect their individualistic mood shifts and exercise of control over the very materials of art-making most appropriate for the communicative task at hand. Coady is aware that artists are not confined to a single medium to express their views, as they may have seemed to be in a previous era. Many contemporary ‘painters’ (particularly Schnabel) also created videos and even feature-length films. In Coady’s case, painting represents an essential counterbalance to the more mechanised expressions employed through highly-refined videos featuring ‘Morph’.

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