Mitchell Cheesman

To see the world faithfully is not necessarily to see it truthfully – Mitchell Cheesman works within the latter. A New York speakeasy is obscured just enough to disorient; a Melbourne pub, anchored by a single barstool, holds its surrounding objects in a poetry of chaos. Conventional perspective and scale are disrupted across a single plane, foreground collapsing into background, abstracted enough to move past the pictorial and toward something more truthful.

Accumulation happens out in the world, and transformation occurs in the studio. Fragments of experience, travel, and memory are pieced into a second life. Light filtered through colour becomes a way of seeing that is atmospheric rather than descriptive. Colour, shapes, impressions, and fragments are arranged not to depict a scene but to elicit a feeling.

Painting in thick impasto oil, he treats the genre as a structure capable of holding almost anything: landscape, interior, object, place. A wooden table becomes an open field; a candle stands in for a lamppost; a narrow wall reads as a vase. The traditional arrangement of objects is exaggerated and reconfigured until its meaning shifts, familiar things rearranged into forms not seen before.