The Tyranny of Kitschness: Leslie Rice

Les Rice paints from a position that is, in equal measure, inherited and interrogated. The son of a tattooer, he came of age in the charged atmospheres of Western Sydney and North Queensland studios: rooms perfumed with disinfectant and bravado, lined with flash sheets that offered the first images he learned to love. These early icons of forbidden glamour and masculine mythology—warriors, outlaws, voluptuous pin-ups, and beasts torn from folklore—constitute a visual literacy formed outside the sanctioned sphere of “good taste.” Long before he picked up a sable brush in art school, Rice had already spent a decade tracing, engraving, and inking these images into skin. Tattooing demanded precision and repetition; it rewarded mastery over invention. Art school, by contrast, threw him into the unruly world of gesture, abstraction, and the idea that taste could be cultivated—or discovered to be wanting.

It was there that Rice first confronted the cultural border patrol that polices the boundaries between high and low, between the tasteful and the embarrassing. He found that the visual language in which he was fluent—ornamented, melodramatic, hypercharged—was dismissed as ersatz, derivative, even gauche. Yet instead of retreating, Rice became fascinated by the category of kitsch itself: why some images cringe while others are canonised; why certain sensibilities are condemned as sentimental or excessive; why pleasure must so often apologise for itself.

The Tyranny of Kitschness embraces the messiness of super-hybridity. His paintings pull from tattoo flash, comic-book theatrics, colonial tableaux, and the seductive surfaces of pop culture. They are both homage and send-up, reverent and irreverent. They make visible the push-pull of an artist shaped by subcultural ornamentation but schooled in academic idealism; a painter who recognises the absurdity of both kitsch and its repudiation. In these works, kitsch becomes neither an object of ridicule nor an identity badge but a material condition—something lived, handled, and transformed.

Rice does not claim that this exhibition presents a final answer. Instead, he locates the generative potential in the ongoing struggle with taste, identity, and historical responsibility. Painting here is not an escape from kitschness, but a way to wrestle with it. Sometimes critically, sometimes joyfully, often both at once. In embracing the superabundance of images that shape Australian life, Rice offers a practice liberated from the anxiety of cultural legitimacy and attuned to the contradictions of its time.

If kitsch is inescapable in Australia, as Rice seems to suggest, then perhaps its tyranny can be subverted through a metamodern openness: a willingness to oscillate, to complicate, to enjoy, and to critique. The Tyranny of Kitschness ultimately proposes that confronting our cultural “bad taste” is not an aesthetic exercise, but a way of understanding who we are—as artists, as viewers, and as citizens of a nation built on both brazen fictions and uncomfortable truths.

In Rice’s hands, that confrontation is not only serious business, but also (irreverently and defiantly) fun.

Forward - The Tyranny of Kitschness: A Metamodern Approach to the Problem of Australian Taste
"I am the son of a tattooer. I grew up in tattoo studios near military barracks in Western Sydney and North Queensland through the 1970s and 1980s. The first images I learned to love were vignettes of topless women, heroic warriors, outlaws and ferocious beasts – both real and imagined – all charged with bloody, masculine appeal. I learned to tattoo in the 1990s and did so for some ten years before going to art school in the hopes of learning to draw such things properly, so as to improve my tattooing. Of course, art school – with its emphasis on loose drawing, gesture, form, and creative expression – did little to help in this regard, as tattooing requires a level of precision and rewards creative conformity. What art school did do was introduce me to paint and to ideas, including the idea of taste – and the prospect that I may have none.

I did, of course, have taste, as we all do. However, I learned that my taste might be bad – that the things I had come to believe mattered were, in fact, lowbrow, ersatz culture. Put simply, I learned that I liked kitsch. This revelation did not offend me or deter me, but it did give me pause for thought. What exactly is kitsch? Is kitsch simply bad? What is it that made some things kitsch and others not so? Who makes and consumes kitsch? Are some prone to the seductive siren song of kitsch, others stoically lashed to a mast, their ears filled with bees' wax, impervious to its intoxicating effects? And finally, what is the best way to deal with the apparent ubiquity of kitsch?"