Design and Art Australia Online

Rafael Butron’s work focuses on landscape and the simplification of imagery towards a child-like form of representation. Part of the Sydney Printmakers Society, Butron has also worked at the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales (UNSW), as a printmaking technical officer. A well-established artist, he has exhibited around Australia and internationally in locales such as New York and Bangkok; he has exhibited in group exhibitions as well as many solo exhibitions.

Born in Manilla, The Philippines, in 1962, Butron escaped the political upheaval at the time and moved with his family to Australia at the age of ten, settling at Randwick in Sydney. After leaving school he took courses in painting and printmaking at Seaforth TAFE in Sydney’s northern beaches from 1982-84. In 1988 Butron graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the City Art Institute (now COFA). He decided to undertake a Diploma of Education at the University of Sydney in 1992 so he could teach at secondary schools. However, while working as a casual teacher he was offered a job at COFA as a technical assistant and soon assumed the role of Technical Assistant Officer in 1993. Whilst teaching at COFA, he enrolled in a Master of Art under Idris Murphy and completed his formal studies in 1997.

Butron’s oeuvre began with relatively detailed and realistic works, but has gradually become simpler, reflecting his intent to evoke simplicity through what he calls “monochromatic shapes” (pers. comm.) that serve as basic descriptions of the subject matter, much as a child might see the world. He has said of his art, “I hope that my works could one day be so simple that they will be non-eventful, to the point where the subject matter is unrecognisable” (pers. comm.). In his studies of the landscape around Sydney, Butron has pared back images to the absolute minimum, relying on memory, and the emotional attachment to that memory, in order to manipulate the image.

Since 1990, the artist has divided his works into four categories that embrace the figurative, the land, the water, and cricket and to each of these categories he has assigned a quote. His figurative paintings deal with recurring memory where the figure is a symbolic representation of the artist’s own presence in the landscape. Butron has considered these works as reflecting Henri Bergson’s observation, “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed”. In the Land series, Butron has employed simplified form and colour to record places that elicit an emotional response, again citing Bergson: “There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation”. Similarly, in the Water series, Butron has used pared-down colour and form to suggest water and place as they are dwelt on within the psyche, drawing from Bergson’s expression, “The present contains nothing more than the past and what is found in the effect was really in the cause” Finally, in the Cricket series he has attempted to capture the light in which the game is played as well as his love of the sport, referencing the 3rd Duke of Dorset’s well-known phrase, “What is human life, but a game of cricket?”

Butron has regularly contributed to group exhibitions in Sydney from the 1980s and has exhibited works in the Bangkok Triennale International Print and Drawing Exhibition in Thailand (2008); the Sydney Printmakers exhibition, Atelier Skåra, Gressvik, Norway (2003); and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chile (1999). His work is held in various private collections and public institutions, including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; COFA at UNSW; The Cricketers Association of New South Wales; the University of Western Sydney; and Silpakorn University in Bangkok. His main exhibitions have been held in Wilson Street Gallery, Newtown, and with the Sydney Printmakers annual exhibition since 1998. Butron has been published in Imprint magazine (spring 2008), The Multicultural Art Alliance , The Big Event newsletter and catalogue and The Newtonian (2010).

He has worked with colleague and master printmaker Michael Kempson in Cicada Press, and has also worked in a highly collaborative way with other artists, including his mentor, Idris Murphy. Butron’s minimalist aesthetic is in stark contrast to the more figurative and detailed work of his wife, printmaker Anne Starling, but the two have shared exhibition spaces, while residing in the Sydney suburb of Turramurra with their two children.

Writers:

Hitchcock, Zeena
De Lorenzo, Catherine

Date written:

2010

Last updated:

2011