The practice and philosophy of journaling, diarising and chronicling is at the heart of Alexander Okenyo’s Amor Fati. The show, made up of small still life works and large ‘text paintings’, can be regarded as a series of time capsules from Okenyo’s life as he negotiates the art world, family, the pandemic, and his community in the Derwent Valley of Tasmania.
‘Amor fati’ translates as ‘love of fate’ or ‘love of one’s fate’—a concept that fascinates Okenyo as it has been interpreted by the Stoics of the third century, as well as Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 19th century. “The philosophy allows me to understand myself less as an artist, and more a record-keeper, a note-taker,” he says.
“I am enamoured of diarists like Helen Garner, whose notebooks have given her a place to record the experience of life to herself . . . You see her vacillating between subjects micro and macro—politics, mortality, the state of her city, her street, her family, the kitchen table.
“I’ve thought this is what I’m doing too—this is the role painting plays in my life. I’m keeping a record and developing my thoughts, not for the paintings’ sake but for me to live the best I know how, and crucially, to navigate the state of things as they are—to love one’s fate.”
Okenyo, whose work is held in collections across Australia, says he has experienced a “renewed passion for the still life, the domestic object, and the rejection of pictorialising broader global themes.” He does, however, embrace a more worldly, less domestic context with the text paintings. Yet even in these there remains a thread of personal existential enquiry. “Questions of the meaning of art-making, the value of the practice, and my relationship with the time left to me, all steer my focus.”
Amor Fati
Alexander Okenyo
Bett Gallery
18 March—9 April
This article was originally published in the March/April 2022 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
In The Rites of When, Angelica Mesiti considers the rituals that may mark the seasons in our burning planet. The Tank has been waiting for art like this.
The National Gallery of Victoria has announced the next instalment of the Winter Masterpieces series, coming in June 2025, will be a return to French Impressionism—an exhibition from 2021 that closed as soon as it opened due to the global pandemic.
