Richard Bell | You’d believe me if I was a white man

Milani Gallery 22/07 – 06/08/2011

Richard Bells new solo show at Milani Gallery is arrestingly honest, making no apologies. The lower room plays host to four new Theorems, while the upper space exhibits a group of paintings referencing the Bible’s ten commandments as well as A white hero for black Australia, a new work from Bell and his long-time collaborator Emory Douglas. Bell’s familiar layers of text are present in this new body of work, as indiscernible punctuation-less blocks and interwoven through splatters, silhouetted against rainbow backgrounds.

With this body of work you come for the colour and stay for the word puzzle, though the sense of accomplishment achieved by unravelling the text is mixed with the impact of its sobering message. From the dislocated pieces of text woven throughout the theorem works one can discern tellingly cynical phrases such as “art has always followed money” and “if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen,” while in the second grouping of works the ten commandments are rendered almost unreadable by Bell’s textual distortion.

Perceptively hung, the experience of being surrounded by these works is rather disquieting, the viewer being enclosed in a silent visual racket. The upper space positively reverberates with chanted mantras of thou shalt not, the paintings sitting piously on the gallery walls like Moses’ carved tablets, while the looming theorems of the ground floor boom like the voice of St Peter reciting damnations for colonial Australia’s list of wrongdoings.

This cleverly executed series of provocative images incite reflection on the past, present and future of the relationship between white Australians and first peoples, indigenous and western art, and the Church’s societal role. In You’d believe me if I were a white man Bell delivers a powerful series of works addressing core issues facing contemporary urban indigenous society.

Lisa Bryan-Brown