AustLit

This artist's profile was developed by Dennis Loaney during 2014 at The University of Queensland as a part of the Visual Arts Curating and Writing course, convened by Dr Allison Holland.

Artist: Jon Cattapan

Birth date, place: 1956, Melbourne

Biography:

The son of Italian migrants, Jon Cattapan is a highly respected and extensively exhibited Australian visual artist whose works are held in all major Australian Galleries. Cattapan’s art explores urban topographies and narratives as well as the ethical complexities of human society. His contemporary images are multi-layered and textured, using striking colour palettes. These works are developed in oils or mixed media on linen, canvas or paper. Together with collage and innovative technological influences this creates his distinctive style. Cattapan’s subjects and inspiration have been drawn from his sensitive insight into the urban and social context as well as his extensive travel and artist’s residencies within Australia, Europe, Asia and the USA.

Cattapan holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Arts and a Master of Arts from Monash University. He has concurrently pursued his extensive art career with teaching and is an Associate Professor within the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts . In 2008 he was commissioned as Australia’s 63rd Official war Artist , working in Timor Leste. In 2013 he was awarded the prestigious Bulgari Art Award which provided a residency in Venice, Italy.

Overview of career

First exhibited in 1978, Cattapan has provided extensive solo and group exhibitions in major Australian and regional cities as well as many international centres. His early work, showing Dadaist and Neo expressionist influences, was produced in Melbourne and provided an early demonstration of his non-conformist approach and adventurous use of colour, form and social irony. In the mid 1980’s, and brought about by the death of his sister, a relationship breakdown and a difficult period in London, Cattapan experienced what he described as “little bit of a crisis” . This resulted in an extended stay in his parent’s ancestral town of Castelefranco, Italy, generating a strong interest in the work of both Giorgione and Giotto . Through this period he produced evidently biographical works relating to both his sister and his then turbulent life. This new, Italian-influenced style was more tormented, sombre and biomorphic, starkly reflecting his emotional journey. Scooter Faith, 1986 is an example.

The later 1980’s saw Cattapan return to Melbourne and absorb the everyday stimulations of the local urban environment. While retaining a nocturnal light in his works, he explored subjects such as floods, fire and shootings, capturing the attendant power and drama of large cities. Works such as The Street, 1987 , merge those hard-edged subjects and narratives with small human figures dominated by swirling colour and tones which reinforce a suggestion of human calamity.

Following 18 Months in New York and a subsequent residency at the Australian National University in Canberra in the early 1990’s, Cattapan embarked on his City Submerged series. These works depicted the immense scale and challenges of large urban communities and extended his postmodern urban theme. The 1990’s also saw Cattapan adopt new computer-based preparations for his working drawings, resulting in powerful hi-rise cityscapes constructed from a changed panoptic perspective. These works evoke the stark bright grids and lights suggested by photography and new technological tools. Skeletal 1995 ’ epitomizes this with its blurred city, subliminal grids, bold red palette and contrasting washes of calmer urban colour space. Here Cattapan immerses the spectator in atoms of light and data, still in an uncertain urban life.

The early years of the 20th Century showed a strengthening of Cattapan’s ideological and social concerns. More figurative themes and images of people immersed in these social and political issues came to inhabit his art. Some works still showed his broad cityscapes with underlying technological and socio-political themes. Others however distinctively changed perspective, focus, medium and tone, such as his Carbon Group drawings of 2003 . Prepared with alkyd modified oil paint and pencil on paper, these showed more dominant, clustered and restless figures, blurred carbon-blue lines and remnant data dots, with a stronger tone of estrangement and urban ferment. Cattapan later applied this same stripped-back and haunting style to some of his war artist work, such as Waiting at H-Pod, Dili

The latter part of this decade was marked most notably by Cattapan’s more reflective Possible Histories series, which brought together wider geographies and social narratives. Like a number of these, Cattapan’s later Bulgari prizewinning entry was also a large work, painted across multiple panels. This latter work, Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 4+5), 2012 , is a triptych painted over a five year period with cityscapes and abstract grids set against an image of hard objects discarded on urban streets. This work is now part of the NSW Art Gallery’s permanent collection.

Throughout his art career, Cattapan has also held many senior professional academic appointments. He commenced as a Lecturer in Painting, Drawing and Printmaking at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1982 and progressed via further lecturing roles at both RMIT and the Australian National University in Canberra. He later became a Senior Lecturer and subsequently in 2007 an Associate Professor at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne .

As well as his personal travel to Asia, Italy and the USA, since 1981 Cattapan has undertaken artist’s residencies in regional Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Canberra, USA, India, South Korea and Italy. Additionally, his role as Australian War Artist saw him live and work in Timor Leste in 2008. He also recently undertook further residencies in 2014 in Rome and at Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice, Italy as part of his Bulgari Award.