1973) is an Australian artist who grew up in semi-rural suburban
north-west Kenshurst, where car hoon culture was a proving ground for self-worth and masculinity, and where racing cars and excessive drinking became an entrenched rite of passage for male youth. Quiltys responses to the world of his youth have challenged viewers to contemplate notions of culture, identity, and the glorification of decline that is present in Australian culture. Quiltys works have often demonstrated the self-destructive nature of Australian males, and so accepting he Australian War Memorials official war artist commission seemed like a logical step in the progression of his career (After Afghanistan). Quilty found Afghanistan to be full of dangers, challenging his usual irreverent approach which has often masked the seriousness of his subject matter. His work Kandahar (2011) captures the tension and fear that underlined his own personal experience in Afghanistan, depicting the process of was as a maelstrom of conflicting energies, which aggressively interact within the thickly applied impasto paint. He included the purple hued mountains in the background, which had an overwhelming presence in the landscape; this inclusion is reflective of his initial visceral response to the experience of being in a war zone. Quiltys portraiture has solely been about communicating an emotional relationship with the subject, which he intended to capture through photographing Australian soldiers staring up into the sun, symbolic of the immense and overwhelming challenge of war which they face daily. In his studio back home, he used these photographs and the sitters to articulate the individual soldiers experiences, souls and raw emotions, rather than the landscape of war of captured moments in time. Unlike other war paintings, Quiltys portraits are not a political comment on the war in Afghanistan, but rather his own subjective comprehension of the emotions he encountered by interacting with the Australian soldiers there. For instance, the subject of Troy Park, after Afghanistan, no.2 (2012) is shown in a contorted pose which echoes the soldiers own emotional experiences during the war, and the implications of war such as PTSD; it doesnt serve as an anti-war icon.
SIGNS, CODES ANS SYMBOLS:
The nakedness of the bodies captures their sheer physicality and
presence, as well as the frailty of human skin and the darkness of the emotional weight of war. Also symbolises vulnerability, but in the portrait of the female who chose her pose, strength. The sprawled poses and outstretched arms symbmolise the exhaustion and the need to recuperate expereicned by the Australians in Afghanistan, as they prepare for teir next deployment. The large black tumble weed looking abstract is symbolic of the extreme feelings about the smell, sound and emotions of being in Afghanistan, sucked into the vortex of a giant war machine