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Sydney Morning Herald www.smh.com.au
October 4,1996
Galleries
By Bruce James
Closing today at NSW Parliament House is an exhibition on Aboriginal
deaths in custody curated by Jane Raffan and examined through the eyes
of Elaine Pelot Kitchener and the paintings of Gordon
Syron.
Dispassionate and professional, Kitchener's works are portraits of a
minoriy population engaged in a righteous struggle for judicial
equality.
Syron's are gasps of air from an individual on intimate terms with a
rope. His are political outpourings in keeping with the urban Koorie
art of which he is a pioneer. Yet they aren't sentimental or
propagandistic - qualities reserved for a state imageof the Queen
nearby. Her Majesty's yellow-green iceberg of a dress invades the show.
Syron is a match for it. His clarity and briskness of attack and
humanist imperative underpinning every brushstroke result in narratives
of exceptionl force. The names of Nita Blankett, Misel Waigana, Jimmy
Njanjii, Maxwell Saunders and others are commemorated in
pictorial epitaphs with a bitter edge. His figurative
style has the candour and vitality of grafitti, often
crude, occasionally clumsy.
An early work, Judgement By His Peers (1978), was painted during a life sentence in jail.
Showing the accused as a lone white figure amid an all-black jury and judiciary, it has the
same claustrophobia and craziness as Nolan's version of Ned Kelly's trial.
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