Rone: Empty
It’s virtually impossible to have spent any significant length of time in Melbourne without having been awed by the monumental portraits conceived by one of the city’s most prolific street artists, Rone. Female visages that dominate entire walls – entire buildings – and gaze upon the landscape with eyes that cut straight through the soul.
Yet the internationally renowned Rone has been somewhat absent from the city’s street scene of late, embarking upon self-funded artistic voyages to more far-flung locations across Europe and the Americas, and working on predominantly outdoor murals.
But now he returns. With his first solo exhibition in two years.
Entitled ‘Empty’, the show is ensconced within the Star Lyric Theatre; a building which once stood proud and iconic along a principal Melbourne street, but which is now condemned to be reduced to rubble having been marked for demolition.
It was the lure and idea of forgotten spaces such as this that drew Rone’s attention he revealed in our recent interview.
“I tend to see something beautiful in things that are derelict, dilapidated, forgotten. I’d been searching for a space for at least six months – doing searches and titles searches, writing proposals, making friends with developers and just hassling them – even hassling councils. There was just a huge amount of leg work in finding a space and then even when I pretty much had contracts in hand, they kept falling over. I got offers from other developers, for like a gigantic ex-Telstra call centre that still had 400 desks and all these cubicles in there, but it wasn’t romantic.”
It was in a rather remarkable twist of fate that a friend and fellow artist introduced Rone to the developers of the Star Lyric Theatre, after his own funding for a group show within the building fell through.
“They were kind of like ‘alright, it’s getting knocked down’,” Rone explains. “So I could paint anything and do whatever I liked with the space because it was all going to end up on the ground.”
Whilst the freedom offered by a building set for obliteration no doubt appealed in its own right, the artist’s real attraction for the space lay within the contrast between the theatre’s hey day and D-Day.
“It’s the fact that it was getting knocked down – that this is its last moment,” he elaborates. “I walk into spaces and you can kind of see the memory of what’s been there and the tragedy of what’s happened as well. It’s still not clear why these places are empty and so you try to piece together a story of what’s left behind. Me trying to paint a human element in there, I get starting to see a story in a sense or adding a bit of mystery to what really went on there. It’s like trying to add a human or personal identity to the space – almost a bit of a soul or a ghost.”
This notion of a ghost couldn’t be a more accurate description of the Star Lyric’s revival; a space brought back to life through the haunting beauty of Rone’s muses, perfectly juxtaposed with the death and decay of a building that was once a symbol of Melbourne.
Amongst Rone’s own creations, captivating portraits of Melbourne-based models Suzy Wootton, Sarah Marland and Georgah Crane, stands a relic of the theatre’s past – a hidden mural secreted under layers of paint for decades.
“I knew the potential in there, with the hidden mural that’s been painted over,” says Rone. “So the first thing I did was I got a metric ton of sand and a sand blaster and spent half a week removing the paint that had been covered over it.”
The resulting large-scale portrait that blends 1920s artwork with Rone’s inimitable street style forms one of the exhibition’s standout pieces, adorning the entire back wall of the space and to breathtaking effect. And whilst it is for these gigantic artworks for which Rone is best-known, ‘Empty’ is a melting pot of paper and small-scale canvas works, even unveiling the artist’s recent foray into the field of photography through a series of shots in a career first.
These new ventures, combined with the sheer scale and calibre of ‘Empty’, give a clear indication of the reasons behind the two-year interlude after Rone’s previous solo show.
“Exhibitions are really hard to do,” he reveals. “You have to put a lot of work into them, so it’s not something you want to do every two months and I kind of find projects that I do while I’m travelling and being with the community so much more interesting. I had to be in lock down for the two or three months to put ‘Empty’ together – I had an invitation to go to Buenos Aires but I couldn’t go because of the exhibition. That’s the thing, you have to say no to people.”
The culmination of those three months in lock down came on Friday 14 October, as more than 1,000 people gathered, for one of the final times, in the Star Lyric Theatre, an event which was representative of the social hub that the space had once been.
“It had been forgotten about for almost eighty years and that was what that space was built for,” Rone explains. “I feel so kind of proud to know that we gave it the most grand send off you know? A marked celebration of the stage.”
Installed in Melbourne for the foreseeable, poignantly just around the corner from the soon-to-be demised Star Lyric Theatre, Rone’s exhibitory renaissance offers an enthralling preview of things to come; although quite what those things are, even he isn’t yet sure.
“I literally haven’t planned anything for the rest of the year,” he admits. “I haven’t given it much thought – all I’ve been trying to get to was that Friday night, so I thought, if I can pull that off, the rest of the year doesn’t matter.”
‘Empty’ is open until Sunday 23 October 2016 between 12pm and 5pm daily at 247 Johnston St, Fitzroy.
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