The Banquet of Cleopatra looms over the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection—a cultural leviathan in the far-flung Antipodes. As a schoolboy, I used to stare at its detailed immensity, my head exploding with the complexities of art. Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo’s masterpiece, completed in 1744, contemporises the moment where lust and daring changed the course of history. 

Tiepolo, famous for his ceiling frescos, was the master of the heavenly Baroque vision. Angels and their halos beam out from the Claudian cloudscape, set in the ceilings of the great palaces of Europe. Clustering of man and beast around the perimeter exaggerate the drama, focusing our view to the Divine. It is important to understand that the history of art is not littered with a series of Eureka moments—it is a rich layering of cultural history and artists’ marks that have evolved our way of seeing.

Uniqueness does not come from a bolt of aesthetic lightning—rather, it is derived from artists and their posthumous collaboration with their forefathers. Christopher Horder’s monumental Hotel Tiepolo: Motel Monet, draws on the compositional tension Tiepolo so directly applied to the ceilings. Horder’s clustering of marks revolve around his stretched linen—mirroring the significant moments of the extraordinary Venetian. Dark stains in ink bloom from the alchemy of water and the sun’s UV rays. Horder creates marks that are layered over swathes of watercolour that ebb and flow like the strata of sandstone rock—abstract in form only—not thematic intent.

The contemporary Horder is still directing us skyward—we are looking through the stained glass windows to the enormity of the universe above.  The artist turns up the dial of abstraction and grandeur—both through the physical scale and the immediacy of his methodology. It is the role of the artist to take it further. Horder, unshackled from artistic conventions, picks like a raptor at the moments of modernist practice for his own aesthetic requirements. Yet, he remains informed by the Impressionist godfather, Claude Monet.

The artist is well known for his controlled automation. He makes us feel what he feels—that moment of walking around the romantic, yet rambling garden of a tired motel off Highway One—the detritus of a seventies’ architectural time capsule.  He is living a verse from the gothic songbook of Nick Cave, but, as the sun hits his back in the strangely beautiful garden, the artist is moved by the very same feeling—that moment of the brinkmanship of Cleopatra and Antony all those years ago. At that time, Horder is reminded that our rational contemporary society is still searching for meaning, and probably always will.

Ralph Hobbs
June, 2018