
Merryn Schriever
Managing Director, Australia
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PROVENANCE
Mori Gallery, Sydney
Collection of Sir James and Lady Cruthers, Perth, acquired from the above in 1988
EXHIBITED
les romans de cape et d'epee, l'Hotel Pozzo di Borgo, Paris, November 1987, then touring, Galerie Passages, Troyes, 9 January - 28 February 1988, Foire d'Art Contemporain, Stockholm, 16 - 21 March 1988
On long term loan to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2001 (label attached verso)
LITERATURE
Susan Norrie: Paintings 1986-87, Epernay, France, 1987, unpaginated (illus.)
Whilst the Moet et Chandon fellow in France in 1987, Susan Norrie produced a body of work that formed the foundation of two exhibitions titled les romans de cape et d'epee. Staged successively in Paris and Troyes, both were more installation than exhibition. The first, at the l'Hotel Pozzo di Borgo, was in place for one night only. As Gregory Burke observed, 'Set up in the ballroom of a large aristocratic eighteenth century house, the presence these paintings achieved was emphasised by their overarching scale and their placement on easels.
Unrestrained by the perimeter wall this unruly configuration transgressed that very boundary that paintings conventionally embellish. But despite their move into sculptural space, the works paraded their status as surfaces, tensioned by multiple references to discrete moments in the history of painting. Simultaneously mannerist, heroic and pop in sensibility, these renderings of mythical subjects meddled with the conventions of portraiture. Their carnivalesque quality merged with the system of their display to nuance their surrogate role as players, a theatricality further accentuated by Norrie's use of stage lighting. Thus, transformed by the shifting parameters of reception, the works synchronised both an entry into and a description of an expository space.
This expository space began with the house and more particularly the room. As a specific site this room was already powerfully evocative of centuries of European tradition; its ornamental surfaces implicitly conveying a sense of historical continuity and representational order. As both object and subject the paintings were introduced within the space as characters. Their surface treatment of animal subjects dislocated these forms from a specific time or cultural context. Thus while derived from mediaeval animal myth these forms referred as much to the mundane use of animal caricature within popular culture. Such connotations disturbed their stately presentation as subjects imbued with a sublime human presence. The overall sense of caprice was given further ironic resonance by the title les romans de cape et d'epee, a generic reference to the paintings as cloak and dagger stories. In an artist's statement on the work Norrie quoted Umberto Eco : "in the cloak and dagger novel the fictional characters must move along real historical figures who will support their credibility." While this title layered the installation with further references to a genre of popular fiction it also intensified the allusion to masking, concealment and deception - that blurred boundary between fiction and reality.' 1
1. Gregory Burke, Susan Norrie, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, p. 44-45