From broad perspectives and within individual aims this studio oriented work presents the diversity of classic and modern influences in the current practice of these artists, who are part of the iconic contemporary collective at Gotham Studios in Northbridge.

Caspar Fairhall works within a multitude of media.  His craftsmanship ranges from the three dimensional, through digital prints, photography and film, to traditional charcoal drawing and oil painting.  Dimensionality, real and illusionary, features strongly in Fairhall's work as does combining media on a material level and exploring concepts of perspective on an intellectual level.  He has an interest in coded languages that he develops by incorporating alpha/numeric data on his images, sometimes using printed text as collage on oil painted geometrical reliefs made of MDF board.

Through Time (Binary VII) is such a piece, one that features many angles, like a card with many folds and each face bearing a different image, perhaps a play on the art of looking from individual perspective. The exhibit is loaded with indexical information such as painted grids, lines and shapes which are juxtaposed with language that probe our deep thoughts. It is like a reflection on life's journey, take any perspective you choose.

Fairhall's drawings echo daVinci with his treatment of shadow and line, Flicker and Hum has this quality.  In black and white photocopy, charcoal and ink, a woman is presented twice between lines that recall a rolling TV image that requires adjusting of the vertical hold.  We relate to this 'moving' image because of our experience with how TV creates illusions. Two the digital prints Test Pattern I & II create images of an object that creates images. Combined with excerpts of technological data, Fairhall makes references between codes, symbols and keys that address our own understanding of the matrixical components that are common elements of modern existence.

Conversely, Richard Gunning's work is a well blended combination of contemporary and traditional methods. Using oil on linen, canvas or paper, he composes classical compositions with interior arrangements and still-lifes with tremendous energy.  Realistic and sometimes with an allegorical bent, these paintings are meticulously handled, revealing a delicate brushstroke and treated in fresh cool colours.  The subjects seem to invest spaces with an aura-like ambience.  Gunning seems particularly discerning about relationships in volume, light and colour between the objects in this compositions, rendering everything with careful detail.  They have the graciousness of antiquity about them.  Chair with Peach Painting features a typical wooden chair against a wall, finished in the coolest sea green and with a painting of a peach resting upon it.  (Again, the artist paints an image of a created image.)  Such an ordinary thing is this chair, yet Gunning has imbued it with an aura of beauty that heightens the existence of this object, a reminder of the humble importance of the simplest most understated implements in our lives.

A painting that is somewhat orchestrally chaotic is The Blue Table featuring numerous objects and oddments gathered on top of and underneath a studio table.  This table seems very much a focus of Gunning's working activity, with a skull, a globe, an old painted blue dish and various other paraphernalia residing on it.  He acknowledges the subjects of his genre waiting to be composed in another eloquent painting.

Kevin Robertson is known for still-life studies too, yet this exhibition features everything but.  Exhibiting classical tendencies in his oil paintings, Robertson focusses more frequently on figures within interior spaces that have interesting angles.  Some of the small studies focus on particular buildings and also feature relationships between angles. In Large Studio Interior a woman stands in the foreground looking out from the room onto an urban viewscape.  She stands in a theatrical interior, surrounded by dark contours as the light blazes in from the open upper half of a 'stable' door while the lower half is slightly ajar.  We wonder if someone has just been, a hammer rests on the floor at a distance in front of her, heightening the melodrama of the scene.  The sky outside is full of looming grey clouds resulting in a painting dense with implied meaning.  Robertson allows us to draw our own conclusions.

Clouds also feature exclusively in two sublime paintings - Winter Clouds and Afternoon Sky - painted with attention to form and colour.  These works are highly evocative and technically clever.  They show evidence of controlled emotion, reflecting Robertson's new work as a whole as being more relaxed of late, deep with intention, and the surfaces evenly finished in his usual bold colours.

Overall this exhibition is a testament to the dedicated practice of these three young contemporaries, expressing very individual approaches to the studio subject.