Not a candle to Peter

The fastest recorded time for an Australian sprinter over 200m was set at the Mexico Olympics of 1968.

The record stands today and the time fast enough to have scored a place on the podium at the Sydney Olympics.

The athlete in question, Peter Norman, chose to stand in solidarity with the two Americans he shared the Mexico podium with. He wore a human’s rights badge on his Australian tracksuit.

A move that ended his career and meant, but for a documentary made by his nephew, that he would have slipped into obscurity. Though he was never invited to participate in the Sydney Olympics, he is viewed as a hero abroad by Americans. For Australians filed away, in the ‘repressed memory folder’ of the Australian nations childhood in the basement, under a rug, behind a locked door.

The power of wilful ignorance cannot be overstated; it is the state sanctioned censorship behind our nations ‘Colonial Stockholm Syndrome’.

I couldn’t paint Peter… I’d sat on the idea for too long, I rushed the painting, and I didn’t have the adrenalin rush of violent potential to armour me against the heartbreak… so I painted Sidney Nolans Ned Kelly in his place.

Ned Kelly is an interesting example of oppressed people… the motive, or social situation that he endured was poor Irish catholic rebelling against the rich squattocracy of the establishment -and the British colony. His actions brought about a royal commission into police corruption.

This isn’t really why Sidney Nolan related to him, Nolan was on the run under an assumed identity, to avoid war - The outlaw helmet is symbolic, with the sky showing through, as though empty.

The image is best appreciated as a diptych alongside ‘dark emu, black swan theory’ the horizon lines mirror one another and the story of both helps explain the complexity of the issue

These images take me out into the big open space of western and central Australia. The process of making them has given me a new place inside, which is quiet and open and vast.
I had thought of calling it, ‘don’t mind the great barrier reef’ or ‘Daniel O’Connell and Fredrick Douglas on a staircase’

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Growing up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, Coates often felt a sense of estrangement caused by the inauthenticity of his surroundings. This has become a central theme in his artwork as he sees this cognitive dissonance reflected in the broader social fabric of Australia.

After dropping out of high school, Robert was accepted into art school solely on the merits of his portfolio. But his restless nature and dislike of institutions let him to leave before graduating, setting him on a journey through a plethora of places and communities on the rugged edges of society.

His myriad careers, from being a chef in inner city Sydney, to working as a builder in Western Australia, deep underground in the mines of the Tanami desert or abseiling waterfront high-rises has taken him across the Australian continent several times. Mirroring his working life, Robert’s art has a muscular physicality and urgency surrounding his creations.

His themes deal with his feelings about Australia, it’s history, the immense beauty of it and the sadness that resonates through the land and it’s people. In his work he explores the relationship we have to our surroundings, specifically in relation to his own country, but also more broadly interrogating the interconnectedness of everything with a raw, unforgiving spontaneity.

Robert has exhibited work in Sydney, Perth and Darwin
Most recently in the 2019 Mosman art prize, and in the 2019 Korean-Australian Art Prize.