James GLEESON
Australian 1915–2008
For more than six decades James Gleeson has explored the realms and possibilities of the Surrealist creed and sought to show that there exists, beyond the obvious and everyday, an alternative reality experienced through dreams, hallucinations and differing mental states. Rather than focusing on purely private fantasies, the most significant contributions made by surrealist artists, including Gleeson, are the visionary and profound statements that comment on the human condition.
Although dated 1951, The Siamese moon was painted in 19521 and was initially shown in the artist’s solo exhibition in September 1952 and again in a group exhibition in December of that year:
Just to be contrary, James Gleeson’s ‘The Siamese Moon’, which deals with literature and sleep, is far removed from both; sensations, mostly unpleasant and intentionally so, still linger after the subject has been forgotten.2
Painted after Gleeson’s initial trip to Europe, The Siamese moon is characteristic of the artist’s work of the period, blending an eclectic and highly personal mix of images from literary sources with historical references to art and architecture. A naked, male figure, whose body is a mosaic of human and non-human tissue and machinery, appears entombed beneath the Earth’s surface, although remaining visible to the viewer through the splicing of the foreground. In the night sky above, the ghostly glow of the double moon is eerily echoed in the image of a co-joined male and female, which emerges from the ruins of the acropolis of a classical city.
No one visiting Europe for the first time in the years immediately following World War II could ignore the devastation caused by human conflict. For Gleeson the sense of loss was made most poignant when it included sites that enshrined the essence of past cultures. The destruction of buildings of supreme historical significance resonated for Gleeson as a ‘double killing—the destruction of the cycle itself and the death of the past which it had previously made alive’.3
A sense of prophecy pervades many of the artist’s compositions. In The Siamese moon the viewer is a witness to the mystery and anxiety of the unknown. The illogical and disturbing landscape appears to look simultaneously to the past and future. A future is implied, but perhaps the present scene also refers to a punishment associated with the past.
GS
1 The artist’s diary records the work as having been commenced on 8 July and completed on 1 August 1952.
2 Sydney Morning Herald, 10 December 1952, p. 2.
3 James Gleeson, quoted in Renée Free, unpublished working catalogue of James Gleeson’s paintings.
Geoffrey Smith