"Welcome to the Pleasure-dome", catalogue essay for "Reflections on Hyperspace," an exhibition of paintings by Peter Daverington, Until Never Gallery, Melbourne, July, 2006

The realm of hyperspace is a product of the 1980s, a now-anachronistic future dreaming that yoked together the hedonism of early digital and late disco with the expansive, complex spaces of a Romantic revival. In this, Daverington's paintings owe as much as Frankie Goes to Hollywood to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 opium-fueled vision of an exotic Eastern palace, the “pleasure-dome,” around which caverns, rivers, walls and towers erupt from the earth and tumble together in fragments.

After two years spent living in Egypt, and hours mastering Arabic calligraphy and the ney flute, Daverington's work suggests an orientation towards alternative modernities, in which the debt of Western science to innovation in the early Islamic world is recognised (as in recent research by Professor George Saliba). Daverington's time in the Middle East produced an appreciation of the Eastern origins of Western optics and the mystical dimensions of geometry and mathematics, via Sufi philosophy. Thus, even while his paintings reference the fluorescent colours and triumphant dimensionality of early video games, Daverington's cartographic engines also aspire to lines of flight from the subjugation of numbers to the demands of Western capitalism for financial modelling and real estate deals. Instead, Reflections on Hyperspace is concerned with the production of hybrid pictorial spaces through a seamless series of visual tricks and juxtapositions. In a series of carefully executed oil paintings, a cloud-topped mesa combines with luminist fragments sourced from the mid-West landscapes of Albert Bierstadt or Daverington's own image of the Patagonian mountains, sit alongside the blank industrial landscapes bereft of figures that are the prerequisite ground for the development of modern graffiti.

Despite the clear influence of graffiti aesthetics in the visual dynamism of Daverington's work and his own significant role in the development of graffiti in Melbourne - paired with artist Merda he won the first national aerosol art competition, held in Melbourne in 1991 - he has always been easily distracted from graffiti's egotistical drive by images from nature. The stylised lettering of his early graffiti pieces are littered with miniature landscapes, golden mountains, birds, sea-life, unfashionable painterly elements and his trademark checkerboard, tropes that all reappear in these later works.

Daverington achieved a second departure from traditional graffiti forms through a range of intuitive aesthetic and conceptual connections between the shapes of graffiti and Arabic calligraphy. However, the palette of the resulting work, both murals and canvases, rarely extends beyond the grey of concrete or the surfaces of Melbourne's Hitachi and Comeng train carriages, transected by razor-sharp lines identical to the tones of Fushia and Aqua Tuxan shoesprays, aerosols of choice in the 1980s, an era before imported European and American colours arrived in Australia.

Within the year that New York-style graffiti arrived in Melbourne, and the year of Frankie's hit single, the critic Fredric Jameson published his groundbreaking 1984 article “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” which, without addressing graffiti, examined the arrival of “the latest mutation in space - postmodern hyperspace.” For Jameson, hyperspace produces permanently bewildered subjects, “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organise its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in an externally mappable world.” As well as referencing the architecture of Cairo's Old City, Daverington's landscape also owe something to the strange, once-new surfaces of Jameson's Los Angeles, which rendered the viewer disorientated, making “our older systems of perception of the city somehow archaic and aimless, without offering another in their place.”

Reflections on Hyperspace offers no attempt at a totality; instead, complex works such as A Geometrical Universe introduce relentlessly hybrid spaces of contradiction that aim to re-tune our senses. As Jameson argues, in attempting to navigate and represent contemporary experience we cannot return to a “mimetic enclave.” Instead, the paintings of Peter Daverington promote an alternative of aesthetic innovation, following Coleridge's founding Romantic desire, “to build the dome in air.”

Peter Daverington website