Over these last months, I’ve had the great joy of watching a series of beautiful and stunning images by Michael Galovic, based on The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise, unfold. In watching the images evolve, step by step, I gained an increasingly deep respect for the complexity of the process, from the gessoing of the boards, through the creation of each layer of moulding and gilding, and then the layers of painting where specific features and then the final delicate detail emerge.

This truly gave me a deeper understanding of, and insight into, the sheer complexity and technical skill involved in successfully balancing each layer, with their different components and levels of permeability, to create the works.

Michael’s artistic background is unusual in that he is both an iconographer and an artist. It is these two aspect of his practice that underpin his work across different material and genres. His childhood in Serbia was visually enriched by art in general, his mother being an art historian and his step-father working on the restoration of frescoes that had been whitewashed during the centuries of Ottoman rule. Michael then followed this with five years of training at the Academy of Arts in Belgrade.

This eclectic background gave him an enormous appreciation of the skill, subtlety and sheer brilliance of medieval art, through from Romanesque to the early Renaissance, especially in the religious context. As a painter of icons, he had a wide-ranging technical understanding of the qualities of the media involved as well as a fascination with the imagery and symbolism portrayed in a variety of different forms. This has informed the diversity of directions in his art practice over the last thirty years he has spent in Australia, with many of his works depicting his fascination with concentric circles representing spheres, similar in effect to the almond shaped mandorlas, such as those found in icons of The Transfiguration, where the viewer’s gaze is drawn further and further into the image.

Michael’s current journey began with ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’, inspired by a small segment, often barely noticed, of ‘Madonna della Vittoria’, painted in tempera in 1496 by Andrea Mantegna to commemorate the purported Gonzaga ‘victory’ over the French in the Battle of Fornovo. He has taken up this small image of Adam and Eve, depicting the moment at which Adam is about to bite the apple, which forms part of the dais on which the Madonna is seated and has paid homage to the sculptural quality of Mantegna’s work by creating the scene in bas-relief, embellishing the Tree of Knowledge with delicate gilding. This image has then been placed against a predominantly dark field, evoking the night sky, that extends around and far above the figures, highlighting the momentousness of the act about to be taken. Mantegna’s work, as a whole, places the fall in relation to redemption, immanent in the figure of Christ.

A vivid visual contrast is provided by the second work in this series, based on the Romanesque ‘Fall of Mankind’, a section of the wooden Hildersheim painted ceiling, created c 1230 ce. As in Mantegna’s depiction, the figures of Adam and Eve are captured at the moment of decision, backgrounded by a rain of golden apples, and enclosed in a vivid red circle, highly evocative of the icon images of Elijah’s ascent in a chariot encapsulated in a fiery circle. In both instances, the circle symbolises the ‘otherness’ of the protagonists – in Elijah’s case, a positive movement beyond the earthly plain and, in the Hildersheim ceiling, the imminent loss of paradise. There also seems to be an interplay between the falling apples in the Hildersheim image and the Greek and Norse legends of the golden apples which conferred immortality. However, the Hildersheim image gives a clear message of the potential for redemption, highlighted in Christ’s gesture of blessing.

To the original image, Michael has added a dais made of strongly geometric images. These are an homage to the vivid and startlingly modern geometric nature of much Romanesque tiling, often ignored underfoot! Again, the image of the circle as a representation of a sphere or other realm is highlighted and provides a strong visual link between the two parts of the image.

The third work, “The only Paradise is Paradise Lost: To Gauguin’, is an exploration of Gauguin’s perception of Tahiti in relation to the idea of Paradise and Paradise Lost by someone who is arguably one of his greatest admirers! In the image, Michael references aspects of five of Gauguin’s works – ‘Tahitian man, woman and cat’, ‘Parua na te vaua ino (Words of the Devil)’, ‘Nevermore’, ‘The Meal’ and ‘Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?’as the basis for creating an enormously vibrant and dynamic image. The Devil’s humanoid presence in the background has been transformed into a serpent that flows to the foreground of the image, confronting the viewer, while the figures representing Adam and Eve are highlighted against an ovoid shape in tones of vermilion and orange, echoing the red disc encapsulating Adam and Eve in the Hildesheim ceiling. Other fascinating elements are the transformation of the man’s cigarette in ‘Tahitian man, woman and cat’, to an apple and that of the man reaching for a fruit in ‘Where do we come from’ into Eve reaching for an apple. Her nakedness is covered by a softer version of the raven of Gauguin’s ‘Nevermore’ while Adam’s is placed behind a hand of bananas from ‘The Meal’.

Through the use of these images, Michael has evoked a sense of the deeply ambivalent nature of Gauguin’s experience of Tahiti, while also creating a new work in which these elements coalesce with an acknowledgement of indigenous Australian dot work techniques to form an intensely vital exploration of The Fall, which complements the ‘frozen in time’ moment of decision captured in the first two works.

Kerrie Magee