Melbourne-based painter Josh Fartch is known for a contemporary approach to colour and light. He has exhibited in solo and group shows across Australia and the UK. He holds a Master of Fine Art (Research/Painting) from Monash University and works from his studio at River Studios in West Melbourne.
Rooted in painterly tradition, Fartch’s work is built through process—layering, reworking, and shifting between control and accident. The paintings move between intention and chance, order and disruption, and often resist any neat sense of resolution. Exposed linen plays an important role in the series, grounding the colour and giving the surface a tactile pause amid the intensity.
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Like life, painting has moments of creation and destruction; somewhere in between these two states is my painting practice. For me, painting is a form of inquiry – research conducted through material, revision and attention – where the work finds its intelligence in the push and pull between intention and what the surface reveals.
Painting as Deferred Action
In my recent series of abstract paintings, I’ve been working toward luminous, materially insistent surfaces through a deliberate, rhythmic method: dragging acrylic forward and backward across the canvas, layering, obscuring and revealing in continuous motion. Paint is pushed and pulled until it starts to register as time as much as colour. Interference pigments shift with light and viewing angle, so the surface never fully settles; it holds an unstable, breathing presence.
A key influence on how I think about this work is Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996), which I first came across while researching my Master of Fine Art at Monash University. It’s become one of those books I return to often–partly because it keeps opening up, and partly because it articulates something I recognise in the studio. Foster’s discussion of Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) – the idea that events aren’t always experienced fully in the moment, but are later re-formed and charged with meaning–has a direct analogue in how these paintings are made. Each forward pull of the brush anticipates the next mark; each backward drag reconstructs or partially erases what’s already there. The canvas becomes a temporal relay where intention and accident, order and disruption, are constantly revised. In that sense, the surface isn’t ‘finished’ in a conventional way – it’s perpetually deferred, always in the process of becoming what it is.
This way of working also sits close to Foster’s argument that the neo-avant-garde isn’t simply a late echo of earlier movements, but a practice that returns ‘with a difference,’ gaining its force through retrospective reconstruction. My abstractions are shaped by the legacies of gestural abstraction and colour-field painting, but not through quotation or pastiche. I’m more interested in what happens when you meet those histories through the stubborn materiality of paint now – through repetition, resistance and revision. The interference blues and luminous veils add another layer of instability: perception changes as the body moves, which feels aligned with Foster’s sense of the real as something that emerges through recursive, unsettled encounters rather than as a fixed essence.
What I’m trying to hold in these paintings is a tension between immediacy and depth. The colour registers quickly, but the repeated layering and erasure carries an undercurrent of destruction and recovery. Each decision is filtered through what has already been lost, covered over or reactivated. The work accumulates through a kind of controlled undoing – making that doesn’t pretend it can start clean.
In a culture saturated with fast, dematerialised images, I keep coming back to painting’s physical weight and temporal density. These canvases insist on that: on the drag of the brush, the residue of earlier states, the way light catches a surface differently from one moment to the next. If there’s a ‘return’ here, it’s not to purity or origin, but to a real that stays mobile – something continually reconstructed through the hand.
Within the current Melbourne context, I think these works carry a quiet confidence: materially serious, conceptually engaged and unapologetically painterly. They’re my attempt to bring a contemporary abstract practice into conversation with Foster’s account of the avant-garde–not as a theoretical overlay, but as something that’s felt in the actual logic of making.
Abstract grounding
Earlier in my life, I worked in Aix-en-Provence on an exhibition marking 100 years since Cézanne’s death. Spending time so closely with his work left a lasting impression on me. What continues to stay with me is not only his role in shaping modernism, but the openness within his paintings – the way passages remain unresolved, forms are only partly held and the image seems to hover between structure and dissolution.
That quality has become important in my own abstract painting. I am interested in the potential that sits in unfitted edges, exposed ground and areas that resist closure. Rather than fully resolving the surface, I want the work to retain a sense of possibility – as though something is still shifting, still possible. In Cézanne’s paintings, detail is often withheld in a way that creates atmosphere and invites the viewer to complete the image for themselves. I am drawn to that same tension between presence and absence, certainty and openness.
Once or twice each year, I return to still life painting from life. I find it valuable to work directly from life – to slow down and study relationships of form, light and colour. I borrow from Cézanne’s palette and pursue a loose impression of form and light. They sit alongside my abstract practice as another way of exploring incompletion, structure and the quiet energy of what has been left unresolved.