Jenny Topfer makes paintings that operate in a world of whispers and patient disclosure. Their communicative intent is held — undemonstrative. Such discretion remains rare but for Topfer, consideration and judgement have quietly accumulated over a long arc of time.
There is simultaneously much more and much less at stake in these recent paintings. Made on either side of calamitous fires in Tasmania, fire that took many of the works and very nearly her home, these paintings can’t help but infer something of the risk and transience that accompanies making a painting.
Beneath their tenacious surfaces lies a web of orienteering gestures, looping calligraphies that are more about personal ceremony and establishing her own physiological cadence than being a dominant substrate to the paintings. They anchor the body of the painting philosophically more than architecturally. In a sense they become fugitive, subsumed by a newer more robust approach to material. Vestiges of the earlier calligraphy occasionally remain visible as the edges of the canvas — as if the pigment has retreated in a seasonal thaw.
Look closely at the surfaces and you can sense something of their construction as pigments rasp and abrade over an ever-developing body. You can almost hear the pigment, feel its advance, witness its progress as it colludes with the linen. This exchange between energy, material and support is at the heart of Topfer’s work. My repeated analogies to weather systems, to the hushed environment they inhabit is simply an attempt to apprehend them assisted by allegory. Truth is that all they ask of you to look as if you were listening — with a little patience and composure.
