In June 2001 Phenomena New Paintings in Australia: 1 opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The exhibition comprising work from just 14 Australian Artists included Galliano Fardin and Howard Taylor. It also travelled to The Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. The catalogue essay written by curator Michael Wardell includes the following commentary and observations.
The artists in this exhibition were selected more for their individuality than their conforming to a particular creed. What they do have in common is an intelligent awareness of both the art of the past and of current critical responses to the art of the past. They are all producing work that goes beyond the mere making of beautiful pictures and they are consciously avoiding the unrestrained expression of subjective emotions. However, they also embrace the importance of a poetic response to the outside world. No longer interested in ‘art for art’s sake’ these artists are investigating, with pragmatic objectivity, the inherently subjective realm of phenomena.
Like Howard Taylor, Galliano Fardin lives in the bush, and his work is also concerned with the experience of being in the land. However Fardin’s art evolved from quite a different beginning to that of Taylor. Whereas Taylor gleaned the essence of being in the land from close scrutiny of nature, Fardin comes out of the late modernist tradition of process art. The paintings reveal the process from which they are made, emphasising the element of time as an inherent component, in the fine hand drawn lines that make up the compositional grids. The evident time, patience and care taken to make these paintings demand time, patience and care from the person viewing them. Fardin’s art, therefore, is a meditative process that, like litmus paper, absorbs the world around him and changes with the changing light of the landscape.

Michael Wardell
Curator. Art Gallery of New South Wales