Demographic 1994 by Patrick Hromas

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This fine art drawing is comprised of black split pen and ink on found papers laid on a white gessoed canvas stretched on stretcher bars, with near-black shadows painted in brush and ink directly onto the gesso. The proportions of this postmodern surrealist artwork, that veers towards an anime mode of representation, in parts, are 16 to 9 in a landscape format. The three main groups of figures form an “N” shape, in entirety.

On the left side the busts of a pair of horses are carefully drawn in pen (as described above). Both heads, necks seen from the left hand side of the animals, and both have their muzzles half buried in chaff bags, strapped behind their ears. They are drawn on a pale eggshell blue paper. The central figure is that of a stylised Scythian corpse, dressed in a funerary smock, perhaps male but his face is left completely blank. He wears a close fitting fez. He is drawn again in pen and ink on a thin, model airplane paper that has a chestnut hue.

A larger, looming figure towers above this diagrammatic figure, in a style reminiscent of sci-fi film “Akira” (1988), popular during 1994 amongst university arts students. Although this figure, that is depicted disconcertingly, upside down, has elements appropriated from the film “RoboCop” (1997), and his hyper-masculine limbs are depicted using a wire-frame construction of facets that depict a hyper masculine robotic nightmare that owes as much to the Transformers Franchise as it does the other two films. However, in a tongue-in-cheek way, this figure sports a triple cupped bra and is drawn in black ink (using the above mentioned technique) on an almost red-pink form hugging silhouette of fragile tissue paper. Notably, his right forearm sprouts a large calibre missile launcher from his elbow, instead of a hand, and his crotch shows an old fashioned stainless steel household tap, instead of a male member. At the juncture of imaginary lines that might extend the upper lines of the two horses necks, the end of the muzzle on the robot gun-arm is at a point at where the funeral figure would have his solar plexus positioned, hovers or is ejected from the gun muzzle a small figure. It is a small man dressed in the height of fashionable fawn 19th Century hose and black coat and tails, wearing a top hat. Although, in this instance, the white of the gesso has been carefully exposed by almost completely cutting out the chestnut paper, to form a negative silhouette of the dapper but equally faceless gentleman. He is also drawn in a cross hatched manner with split nib pen and black ink, but in a more adroit manner, reminiscent of an engraving from that era.

This gargantuan, geometric robot, has no discernible knees, and his whole body is angled almost at 45 degrees from the angle of the restful corpse, with which the robot’s upper legs and simple triangular prism of a pelvis overlaps, letting the brown paper of the reposed figure show through. Below the tap like appendage, in the centre of the front of the pelvis-triangular prism, is the French words written “Crois” written next to an arrow that points to a square aperture, translated into the English word “Change”. The robot’s lower legs are wider than his upper legs, giving the figure a somewhat “AstroBoy” appearance, as if his legs shared the same jet propulsion.

Only the robots lower left leg has a small hole in it with the words “Cup return” written upside down, below it, like a coffee vending machine. The legs are column-like rectangular blocks, but we cannot see the step that is the recessed facets between them, due to our high viewing angle. This isosceles triangular prism is truncated at its lowest point, emphasising the perspective (seen from below) of this menacing futuristic emblem of malevolence. His lower torso is a slender highly attenuated triangular prism, yet we see only the front face of it, it’s top and bottom severely truncated. In the centre is another, larger, square void, below it written “Le Café”. It is at the centre of this hole, the left hand is positioned, except it has the appearance of a prosthetic claw, holding a tray, horizontally, upon which a miniature tea pot, cup and saucer are proffered, apologetically. Above the level of the hips, the left muzzle-arm has a rectangular prism for an elbow, the claw-arm is fitted to a long cylindrical forearm, terminating in a vertically positioned rectangular prism, it’s lower front and rear edges chamfered, thus enabling the tea tray to move up and down with a barrel joint. He has impossibly large shoulders in rounded bio form prisms, his upper arms are reduced to mere rectilinear stumps. Steampunk, Monty Pythonesque forms connect these oversized shoulders, forming a handsome chest. “Milk no biscuits” is scrawled on an SUV-like grill in the centre. Above this, written on the underside of the chest surface (visible from the viewer’s position) states lettering, indicating the figure’s identity “The Tyrant”, in capitals. In larger capital letters on the front face of the left and right shoulders, respectively, “War is Peace” and “Love is Hate” are written. Linking the two George Orwell quotes, written in the same, but slightly smaller lettering is the third maxim: “Ignorance is Strength”. A RoboCop, cylindrical head surmounts the terrible figure, with a Sydney Nolan/Ned Kelly black slot for unseen eyes.

Conversely, the figure of the deceased Scythian, an ancient tribe of horse riding people who lived in present day Syria, who left ornate jewellery at burial sites, is an offshoot of my youthful obsession with horses. The artist believed that they were a kind of “Dr Who” race of sub-humans, and borrowed the term to describe present day horsemen and horsewomen. Hence the faceless figure, has elegant arabesques of whip-like lines that cross his form.

The horses on the left hand side of the artwork are a kind of cool, repose, a place for the art viewers eye to rest not only on the upper figure’s vertical, and misty rain-like semaphore line work, but a place to reflect upon life. Similarly, the lower equine figure has her ears drawn back, not in anger but in pleasure, her gentle whorls of her hide, gently creeps across her Morgan-horse-like forms, entirely trusting you to reach out and stroke her beautiful countenance…

Patrick Hromas
41 artworks

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Springwood NSW, Australia, Australia

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Artwork Description

Ink on paper, ready to hang.

Signed on the back.

This experimental surrealist, postmodern, drawing and collage with an undercoat of white gesso with shadows painted in brush and ink, was completed in 1994. Patrick Hromas was still studying at the Canberra School of Art and Design, at the Australian National University, and his experiences of his time studying his major: Graphic Investigation was manifold. He was overjoyed to be able to study on a full time basis with fantastic tutors, such as the literati John Pratt, the earnest, insightful John Hardy, the caring, brilliant printmaker Dianne Fogwell, and the recipient of the French Legion of Honour, Czech born master printmaker and bookmaker, Petr Herel (dec. April 2022). However Patrick’s joy was overshadowed by recently being diagnosed after a brief psychotic episode, in the winter of 1993, whereupon his mother whisked him away from his studies in Canberra, Australia’s capital city to a doctor in Sydney’s North Shore. It took only 25 minutes for the doctor to diagnose him with schizophrenia and prescribe antipsychotic medication.

On the other hand, the artist took great delight in learning in depth about many French artists, not only from the definitive word on art history and contemporary art, a celebrated, man with a swagger in his step and an incurable fascination with the art world, David McNiel, but also the two Johns mentioned above. This stirred the wild imagination of the young art student. Not only were the artworks of fin-de-circle (his heroes) painters Henrí de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas and Francis Picabia being analysed in his art history/art theory lessons every Wednesday morning, he also could feel their dreams and aspirations, spoken at length with his good friends (including the pianist/musician turned writer Ewan Battersby). There was also a formulation of a malevolent, spiritual entity, the Tyrant, comprised of a marriage of evil and technology, forming in his young mind. The flip side to this, was a benevolent, super ego (as coined by Professor Carl Jung), an entity comprised of a global spiritual equine being, he simply called “Equus”.

I leave it to your own imagination, dear viewers, to discern the iconography of this peculiar but utterly originally designed drawing on layered, found wallpaper, suffice to say that amongst the papers used in the construction of the collaged elements, we find a residue of the Hunters Hill home, in which the artist spent a childhood with his three sisters, in the pale blue wallpaper, a support for the twin, split pen and ink Horses.