'Is it an earthquake/Or simply a shock/Is it the real turtle soup/Or merely the mock?'  I’m remembering the words of Cole Porter's Broadway show song ('At Long Last Love') as I enter the Goddard De Fiddes Gallery in West Perth to view Justin Smith's 'A Miracle of Modern Colour Photography'for the third time.

Actually his full name as listed in the show’s catalogue is Justin Edward John Smith, and this is appropriate to the Baroque traditions of art that gallery principal Julian Goddard says the artist has claimed to be among his inspirations for these works.

The first thing that strikes a viewer is that these digitally rendered 'paintings' are huge.  There are twelve six-colour solvent inkjet prints on vinyl-coated nylon, with the biggest in this Perth International Arts Festival event spanning two-point-four by three-point-four metres.  There they are: towering from floor to ceiling!  They’ve been printed in Sydney and stretched onto frames here in Perth (no mean feat).  A few smaller prints - with some said to be from earlier periods of the artist’s work - are hung in an area behind the main exhibition space.

The smaller works in the main space can be variously viewed as flowers, or folds of diaphanous fabrics.  There's also a circular photograph on aluminium in the back room measuring just over a metre in diameter.  Three copies of the circular piece had sold when I visited on this occasion, and two of the top-of-the-range numbers were going to new homes.  One of these was Paris, 2047, 2006, in which the face of a young girl has been digitally altered to project the allure of the woman this youngster could possibly become 41 years into the future.

Justin Smith is an English-born artist, who now lives in Perth and freelances around the world for leading glossy fashion magazines, such as English Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.  But when he crosses purely into art, he makes viewers dig deep to fathom his meanings.  For instance, the titles of his works run through variously numbered Grotesquatures, Conceived Through Isolation, Ignorance And Inspiration After A Fashion Of Many Great Masters, 2006.  And what about The Third Generation Of Handsome Men As Replacement For The 2nd Most Beautiful Woman In The World In The First Person, 2006?

The big prints referenced in the show's catalogue by their enigmatic titles and numbers (from one to thirteen) are banded at each side by fluorescent lighting tubes.  Their floor to ceiling dominance is also rhythmically broken up by the flower and/or fabric images (I’ll opt for them being fabrics).  Fragrant candles burn in the gallery’s corners.  The plan is to suggest 'frames' in a strip of film, and if you could actually run the 'film', you would get a series of jump cuts and subliminal flashes of the flower/fabric images.  And that's what I think this show is about.  Postmoderniss modes of 'play' and 'pastiche', and in-your-face flamboyance run rampant here, and these characteristics recognisably existed in Baroque art, and continued into the Rococo period as well, and now they're contemporary again.

That leads me to mention what other reviews I've read don't seem to have picked up on.  Smith's art fits neatly with a movement that's been rolling along overseas for some time now.  It involves various methods of 'quoting' Caravaggio to create new, imaginative 'histories' via contemporary art.  Once you're on to this, Smith's likely intentions become clear.  I'm talking about what commentators have termed Baroque art's so-called ‘'eopard skins' of light in deep shadows that are echoed here in Smith’' work.  Hence, the leopard skin-covered cushion in the Paris, 2047, 2006 number is an obvious 'art' joke).  And knowledge of this contemporary movement linked to Caravaggio also 'illuminates' the scale of the works, the extravagant titles, the back and forth between past and present - such as the burning candles and fluoro lights - and so on.  If you want to know more about this, check out some things that have been written by a lady named Mieke Bal.  She’s the reigning guru in this field.

Oh well, 'Good show, Justin', I’m saying to myself as I leave the gallery, while picking up again on that Cole Porter lyric: 'Was it that red wine/This feeling of joy/Or is it at last/The real McCoy?'