'The painter is condemned to please. By no means can he make a painting an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds, to keep them away from the field where it stands, but even the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors.’ - Georges Bataille, The Cruel Practice of Art

This is late because I’ve had to spend a lot of time thinking about what, exactly, to write. The thing is, I love Penny Siopis. I mean generally, not only is her older work genius and fleshy and grotesque and beautiful, she is also a very nice person. All this makes it hard discuss a show that I found genuinely disappointing.

When I expressed my dislike (the words “Tracey Payne” may have been used) to one of her students from Wits he defended her immensely; claiming the work was simultaneously exquisite and hideous, vibrant and destructive, potent with longing – basically, all the things that it should be, but isn’t. He also pointed out her interest in Georges Bataille (something confirmed by the artists and her titles) and his notions of form and formlessness and, I presume, sadomasochism, self, and the ever cum-worthy link between eros and thanatos. Now I also really love Georges Bataille not only because his novella, Story of the Eye, makes the Marquis De Sade look like a boy-scout in its calmly considered, infinitely sexy descriptions of necrophilia, murder and good old fashioned boiled eggs (download the full text here, read it, you’ll wet your panties) but also because Bataille had some incredibly smart things to say, not only about sex and death (two of my favourite topics), but also about art. Basically, a lot of The Cruel Practice of Art is about the transfiguration of the terrifying, the hideous, the abject into something seductive through art – painting particularly. Penny Siopis’ new work feels like it is trying to achieve this transfiguration, with violent explosions, ugly browns, women bound and exploding their entrails mostly in Hallmarkesque pinks and turquoises . Certainly a lot of the paintings in the show are pretty hideous, well ugly at least. And Migrants, the one work that I really like, seems to best turn a certain revulsion into something attractive and, not unlike a car accident, hard to look away from. The other pieces, however, just strike me as too literal, too figurative and too easy. Sipois speaks of transforming a dramatic moment, a fissure, an unease in her paintings; always stressing the importance of both materiality and process – but these paintings just seem to hold to tightly to pretty representations.

If, as Siopis states, “[Process, chance and materiality] creates a vital tension or energy between form and formlessness, balancing them on a knife’s edge”, then I think she might just need a sharper knife.