MELBOURNE.- Tolarno Galleries is presenting Writing poems to the moon, a new exhibition of drawings and related paintings by Melbourne artist Brent Harris.

Installed across both gallery spaces, the exhibition encompasses a series of 15 conté drawings on laid paper and seven related paintings in Gallery 1, alongside eight hand-coloured prints based on an earlier work in Gallery 2.

Harris connects the exhibition’s title to the idea of a drawing or painting forming in a similar way to that of a poem – as a phrasing of forms – giving rise to an oblique and personal symbolism.

As the moon is for Harris, so it has often been a muse for ageing poets as they contemplate their mortality with melancholic reflection. Although there is no actual moon visible, the drawings do have a moonlike glow. “The light from the moon is a reflection,” says Harris. “It’s second-hand moonlight but still contemplative.”

Numbered #1–#15, the conté drawings are Harris’s visual poems to the moon. They often start as small journal jottings made in the middle of the night, and are then elaborated on in the studio when taken to conté.

Conté is a crayon of compressed graphite or charcoal and clay. Admired for its firmness and intensity, conté can produce deep, rich black as well as tonal variations of great subtlety when applied to a textured surface such as laid paper.

The drawings developed over several months and across multiple states. Legs, eyes, faces, figures, hats and mountains gradually emerged through the velvety haze in peculiar, precisely realised arrangements.

As the series progressed, Harris began pulling in motifs and symbols from previous bodies of work. Writing in the accompanying catalogue essay, Hugh J. Magnus notes their appearance: “The tau cross, the snow-capped peaks, the duelling sprites, the hanging, tormented body: these leitmotifs feel like old friends, transfigured.”

“As I grow older, I’m still looking at other artists’ work, artists I’ve always looked at and admired, and new additions, but I’m now also drawing more on my own past,” says Harris. “The drawings really develop and change as they are being made.”

If there is a narrative to be drawn from the series, it is a story with a somewhat melancholic caste that reflects Harris’s feelings on ageing and mortality. Yet the drawings are also playful and, at times, strangely magical.

After completing them, Harris set himself the task of working several of them up into paintings, with further changes occurring in the translation process. “The hardest part was getting coloured paintings out of black and white drawings,” he says. “What works in a drawing might not work in a painting.”

Completing the exhibition are eight hand-coloured prints, variations on a photopolymer etching based on the charcoal study drawing for the large painting Visitor 2024 from his previous exhibition at Tolarno.

“I titled these prints What if (Visitor), as that’s the question I ask myself at various points throughout the day when I’m working,” says Harris. “What if I made the ground yellow? What if I made the sky pink? These thoughts are now made real in this series of variations on worked-over prints.”

“In Visitor 2024, the dress I am imaging is my reference to the Sidney Nolan painting from the Ned Kelly series of Steve Hart on horseback wearing a floral dress. It’s a longer story, but I’ve always been drawn to this gender-bending narrative in Australian bushranger folklore.”

From Harris’s first use of this dress motif in 2022, he has now decided that the spotted fabric represents himself, a reference to his own gender and a talisman for the self (not that Harris is a cross-dresser).

These prints can therefore be understood as self-portraits. “If the white dress with coloured dots is a representation of my adult gender, then the face with a hat on top that’s floating halfway down the dress is a portrait of myself as a boy,” he affirms.

The dress can also be seen in the largest of the paintings, Peaks (poem to the moon) 2025, as a backdrop against which two characters in hats are duelling.

“Those figures represent an internal conflict or a small battle with oneself,” says Harris. “The configuration of peaks is lifted from a Piero della Francesca fresco in Arezzo. The ‘peaks’ are actually the peaks of the tents that appear in the fresco The Dream of Constantine, but I’ve turned them into mountain peaks.”