Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Lucio's Collection, Sydney

From 1981, Imants Tillers has appropriated Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico's paintings, resulting in some of his most striking and enduring works. As Wystan Curnow has written, 'Tillers admires de Chirico for the very qualities which were, after the 1920s, to ruin his reputation: his stylistic 'non sequiturs', his supposed plagiarism or 'appropriations' of old masters and of his own work, and the apparent lack of a seamless linear development. All qualities Tillers' own work displays. And, as his own practice makes clear, he understands that the enigmatic power of the [de Chirico's] early (universally admired) 'metaphysical' works cannot be separated from the artist's lifelong obsession with repetition.'1

Here, Tillers has engaged with de Chirico's 1919 works, The Sacred Fish (I Pesci Sacri), now in the collection of the Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris. Overlaid is the text 'A throw of the dice will never abolish chance' which is drawn from a poem by French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme, who was active at the same time as de Chirico. At the centre of the work are, of course, the fish. An enduring symbol whose roots stretch back to Greco-Roman civilisations, here we are presented with a pair of smoked herrings, surrounded by an assortment of strange, talismanic objects. Once hung on the back wall of the Lucio's dining room, Tiller's sacred fish displayed on their sharply perspectival platter were a fitting emblem to that temple of Italian dining.

Merryn Schriever

1. Wystan Curnow, Imants Tillers and the 'Book of Power', Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 42