 It is hard to forget your first encounter with a Tony Lloyd painting. The dramatic light and exaggerated perspective lures you in, the luscious paintwork and tonal perfection seduces you while the content promises a spectacular climax but leaves you somehow suspended, elated and light-headed. Even his scenes of nocturnal disquiet quicken the pulse, flooding our bodies with adrenaline.
Tony Lloyd’s paintings engender a level of excitement even when they are still, because they also engender a sense of anticipation. Saturated in a cinematic half-light, we almost expect the silence to be shattered by a shrill scream. The paintings have a sense of time frozen, between some pre and post-climax. But they are also, increasingly, timeless. They haunt us through their penetrating ambiguity, and speak of nowhere and of no-when.
Lloyd’s practice now spans over a decade, in which time he has accumulated an evolving body of work that addresses a variety of themes while remaining loyal to a unique and singular vision. As his technique has matured so too has the breadth of this vision. From arcane highways at night and urbanity steeped in peril, his oeuvre has progressed into the deeply unfathomable, and the greater philosophical and spiritual problems we face today. We see his work culminating, presently, in massive sweeping panoramas that recall the Romantic sublime, but also deny any specific influence. They are at once uncannily familiar and strangely elusive.
 Give me just a little more time 2008, oil on linen, 100 x 280 cm. Private collection.
The road and the highway became a recurring motif in Tony Lloyd’s work in the late 1990s, dominating his first exhibitions. Without realising it then his first road painting had come much earlier during art school, but like many of his themes, it made a subsequent return. In Woodlands we see this theme clearly played out: a long, straight road is lit by blurred car headlights. The forestry and darkness loom silently on either side, waiting to close in. It is a reality that confronts us nightly, but here becomes the scene of a gripping drama. Like much of Lloyd’s work it is derived from cinema as much as from personal experience and memory, but he stipulates that the two are indistinguishable: “Film does occur to you (in the same way as actual experience). It is as much a part of your memory as real things.”
The road as motif continued for many years, always throwing up new ideas and new meanings. We see his approach evolve in later works such as Dissolving Shadows and Route 13. “The road is such a fantastic metaphor for anything,” Lloyd says. “Where you can only see what the headlights show, you have to imagine the rest.” It is in these twilight evocations of motorways that the imagination awakens; we must speculate on the need for our speed, and on our destination and point of departure. Like much of Lloyd’s output, the roadways are a people-free zone.
 Route 13 2006, oil on linen, 46 x 61 cm. Private collection.
While the presence of humans is implied we are relieved of their company, making us the sole participant; the protagonist. We might watch silently from the back seat as the trees form a continuous blur or we might occupy the driver’s seat, staring down a harrowing strip of tarmac, but always, it is us and us only. The peril – real or imagined – is ours alone to contend with.
The point-of-view perspective is another cinematic device that Lloyd employs. Its application underpins the essential nature of his work: its inversion of the high-art hierarchy of painting and film. “Cinema is based on the pictorial language of painting,” as Lloyd explains. “I have flipped this around and base my painting on the pictorial language of film.” The roads series, then, is based on a combination of Mad Max and Lost Highway, with a nod to Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 film-noir classic Detour. Lloyd takes still images from films to capture a frozen moment within a wider narrative, to give us a sense of a kind of incoherent story board. There are events unfolding, we are told, but we are not privileged with an insight; we cannot ascertain the storyline that we are caught up in.
 Some velvet morning 2004, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm. Collection of the artist.
In denying us the full narrative Lloyd’s paintings are dislocated fragments without climax or closure. We are reminded of Italo Calvino’s novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which contained ten incomplete novel fragments, all of distinct genres, all incomplete. The effect is of a constant state of delayed resolution; of unsettling infinitude. A space is left for the viewer to participate, with every individual to encounter the works perceiving a different story, and arriving at a unique conclusion.
 Woodlands 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 200 cm. Private collection.
The palpable excitement of Tony Lloyd’s art practice is evident throughout his ten years plus as a practicing artist. He believes ‘an artist should always be excited about making art’, and has consistently challenged himself and his audiences in attainment of this dictum. “There should be excitement within each brushstroke, which will make the whole picture exciting.” Lloyd’s ceaseless fascination for the world is our win; while we may recognise places and spaces that we routinely inhabit, after our first encounter with Tony Lloyd’s painting we will never look at them the same way again.
 Fever 2006–2009, oil on linen, 70 x 60 cm. Collection of the artist.
This extract from Simon Gregg’s Catalogue essay for Tony Lloyd Lost Highways, at Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale, 60–70 Foster Street Sale, until 8 November.
– Simon Gregg
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