https://www.theage.com.au/culture/art-and-design/alive-with-vibrations-the-pandemic-art-that-remade-our-city-s-laneways-20220512-p5akpn.html
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May 12, 2022 — 2.42pm
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VISUAL ART
Flash Forward
Melbourne CBD, 2022
The art of painting, having lost the battle for gallery space over many decades, has nevertheless won the battle of the streets. Close to the pavement, painting remains a genuinely popular art – however we judge its quality – and the energy and rogue vigour of the genre are undeniable.
Nick Azidis’ Flash Forward art in Melbourne’s Highlander lane.Credit:Nick Azidis / City of Melbourne
The City of Melbourne has shown cultural leadership in this potentially messy epidemic of imagery and lettering. Under the banner of “Flash Forward” it has curated a large project to redefine 40 of the lesser-known laneways in town. In many cases, the artworks have clinched the aesthetic potential of some otherwise ugly and noisy rear-end architecture.
The most immediately successful of these public-art interventions are those that function as if they’re a kind of architecture in themselves.
Jarra Karalinar Steel’s artwork for Flash Forward in Melbourne’s Tattersall’s Lane.Credit:Jarra Karalinar Steel / City of Melbourne
An example is Nick Azidis’s dazzling geometric arrangement in blues, vermilion and black at Highlander Lane. The vertical bars are capped with horizontals, as if proposing perspectives that crash or implode. The patterns command an entire wall but also a section of the adjacent walls and pavement, so that the butt-end of the lane is reconfigured as a high-voltage niche.
A similar buzz arises in a kind of exedra in Goldie Place, which the artist Merda has animated with blue bars that dance over a backdrop of greys. The bland architectural dish is alive with vibrations: the simple contrasts are rhythmically engaging, with a surprising suggestion of depth.
Some of the commissioned works have become iconic, to the point that it’s difficult to imagine the city without them. How could we ever revert to the dire neutral blankness of Parliament Station now that we have the scintillating work by Drez at Ulster Place? The concentric rectangles of spectral blues and magenta have connotations of Op Art or the light installations of James Turrell. They ingeniously invite you to plunge into the network of tunnels below.
The Evans Lane work for Flash Forward by Puzle.Credit:Puzle / City of Melbourne