Two exhibitions: Vas Renn and Garry Adams’s “New Works” and Callum Morton’s “Inside Out”.
Vas Renn and Garry Adams “New Works” in the Gallery at the City Library. Two series of hard-edge abstractions with intense colours working on a grid that entertains the eyes.
Vas Renn’s collaged textiles, the pinstripes and other textiles form geometric patterns. They look like microprocessor designs. I first thought with all the detail that these were digital prints, but looking closer; I could see that they were fabric; they are recycled fabric sourced from charity shops with some additional printing.
All those lines of thread, the warp and weft, are woven into a larger pattern that takes Renn’s work from the micro to the macro.
Garry Adams’s series of seven paintings are all about the arrangement of colours. There are filtered colours and contracting combinations in balanced geometric compositions. These aren’t one series of paintings (the difference in framing gives it away), and Adams has been painting like this for many years.
The title “New Works” is misleading since both artists have exhibited these series separately in the last couple of years at Four Eight Four Gallery in North Carlton.
Also geometric, colourful and entertaining for the eye is Callum Morton’s “Inside Out” at Anna Schwartz Gallery. And, unsurprising for Morton, with conceptual and architectural elements. What is surprising is that they are paintings, when Morton is best known for his sculptural work (see my post on Morton’s Monument Park).
Six large paintings the size of the windows in the Sirius Building in Sydney, images where the representational appears to be an abstraction. Along with a series of preparatory like works on paper, with a central “missing image” image. For there is a studied vacuity, an empty architecture, to Morton’s work.
The cartoon-style mouse holes in Morton’s drawings of skirting board reminded me of the one in the shared house I lived in Pascoe Vale, the arch of a genuine mouse hole is flatter.
These and other holes through architecture from the inside out.
Black Mark 
What are your thoughts?