Café tables 1957 is an articulate and complex painting, which weaves a path between figuration and abstraction. As Ian Fairweather explained in an interview in 1963: 'It’s between representation and the other thing, whatever that is, and it’s difficult to keep one’s balance'.1 In Café tables, Fairweather strikes that balance: our focus oscillates between the central group of figures and the abstract shapes that obscure them. This concurrent concealing and revealing recalls the work of the cubist Pablo Picasso, who described his pictures as 'a sum of destructions'.2 Fairweather explored Cubism in Melbourne in the mid 1940s, and it had a decisive impact on the development of his work from this time. Its influence is apparent here in the tables that slant forward, disrupting the illusion of three-dimensional space, and the tilted head in the upper left of the painting.
The calligraphic lines that Fairweather has used to build and break down his image are characteristic of his mature style. Wide swathes of pale green rest on the surface of the painting, working with the multiple layers underneath to suggest depth, and simultaneously drawing our attention to the flatness of the picture plane. There is something brutal and ritualistic about this broader pattern of mark-making, which is tempered by the tracery delineating the figures. These create another level of ambiguity: we may decipher the figures, as the title suggests, as a lively gathering of cafe patrons, or focus on the central motif, a larger figure bonded to a smaller form. In this way, the painting relates to Ian Fairweather’s treatment of the theme of mother and child, an interpretation strengthened by the umbilical link between the figures. The device is used in other works, including the simple but striking drawing Mother and child 1954 (private collection), in which the figures are locked in a state of mutual adoration. In Café tables, however, the mother figure looms over her charge, mocking rather than maternal, and suggestive of a degree of ambivalence on the part of the artist.
Samantha Littley, Curator (Australian Art to 1970)
endnotes
1 Ian Fairweather, interviewed by Hazel de Berg, 30 March 1963, quoted in Murray Bail, Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p.161.
2 Pablo Picasso, in Sebastian Smee, 'His and hers', Weekend Australian Review, 8–9 July 2006, p.19.
