Biography
1 : VISUAL ART :
Ulex Xane has also been a visual artist since the late 1970s, after discovering Dada and Surrealism and becoming involved in the international Surrealist movement and the Surrealist Group in Australia. Since that time, Xane has also worked as a Fluxus artist (specifically the Australian form of Fluxus he founded in 1978 : Sofie Macak). He has created many objects, paintings and other artworks in the Fluxus vein.
Later, Xane's work moved into a more Minimalist style, whilst maintaining elements of Fluxus (plus Arte Povera and Conceptual Art). Specifically influenced by Piero Manzoni, the artists of Group Zero, and the tradition of monochrome painting as avant-garde praxis, Xane developed his unique approach to non-objective analytic painting.
He generates his paintings by defined conceptual strategies which defer the usual aesthetic and expressive decisions of personally inspired artmaking to determinants outside himself; that is, onto the literal and material conditions of the painting medium.
Xane’s paintings are a revelation of the properties of painting, and of paint itself, not as an abstract entity, but as physical matter distinguishable from the pre-primed whiteness of the canvas underneath. It is curious that in spite of their apparent historical origins in action painting, Xane’s works embody a formal rigor, free of intentional expressionistic allusions, yet they simultaneously exhibit a casual disregard for any tendency towards the customary aesthetic precision of much other monochrome or reductive art.
Xane’s painting, far from being the end result of any overtly emotive impulses, is a product of rigidly delineated parameters, involving a number of carefully defined components which limit and control the painting event. These include the selection of commercially primed canvases, the use of specific materials (rollers, synthetic paints), and a deterministic process of application, in which the paint is ‘laid onto’ the surface within a brief single time-span; no stopping from start to finish. The inevitable objectification and depersonalization is further underscored by the repetition of this process throughout the artist’s entire career serial sequence of analytic ‘implexive’ paintings.
Contextually, Xane's work can be posited within the general extended historical schema of monochrome painting, from Kazimir Malevich, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, to Blinky Palermo, Alan Charlton, Claudio Verna and Alan Ebnother.
More specifically, his work can be seen as related to the continuum of artists associated with Group Zero (including Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Rupprecht Geiger, Bernard Aubertin), and the exponents of Radical Painting and non-objective art since the 1980s (such as Olivier Mosset, John Nixon, Gary Wilson, Frederic Matys Thursz, Raimund Girke, Marcia Hafif, Joseph Marioni, Phil Sims, Günter Umberg, et al).
Xane’s work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally in group and solo exhibitions since the 1980s and he is one of Australia’s most important exemplars of non-objective monochrome and minimalist/reductive painting. Examples of his work are held in collections in Australia, Asia, Europe and the U.S.A.
"As with any intelligent artist, Ulex Xane paints not so that observers of his paintings will recognise him, but so that he will become impersonal and unrecognisable. In Latin, 'Genius' meant that demonic element which accompanies and contains the most fertile, creative part of oneself. Like few others, Xane knows the art of how to have the proper relationship with his genius and the impersonal part of himself. Indeed, his art is simply the Locus (place) where Ego loses its subjective nature and Genius approaches, until they touch and ultimately coalesce in the physical fact of the work. This gives Xane's painting that special quality which, as anyone who has seen his canvases or witnessed his working procedure knows, the more unmistakeable and almost idiosyncratic it is, and yet paradoxically the more difficult it becomes to attribute the work to an artist with any 'personal' identity. Which makes Xane not just a great artist, but one with a uniquely coherent vision, even if, like many of his ilk, it were to potentially wound him to death."
- Alphaeus Lanphere
2: AUDIO ART :
Ulex Xane is known internationally as an Avant-Garde composer, musician and recording artist, with many CDs, LPs and cassettes in release on various labels. He has worked since the late 1970s in the genres of Experimental and Electronic sound art; Musique Concrete, Electroacoustic, Acousmatic, Power Electronics, Industrial, Harsh Noise, Dark Ambient, Free Improvisation. His bands/projects have included Streicher, Exterminant, Kulmhof, Extinct State, Blank Point, Abrader, Aghori Bhakta, Goldenrod, Pimp-Aktion Slutgun, Thule Society, Aossic S'lba, Vhril, Zone Void, Psy.Phalanx, The Moralunary Class, Nife Junger, Vzörbkrääth, Kaput Mortuum, etc.
Ulex Xane's experimental sound art was first influenced by his discovery, as a teenager in the late 70s, of LPs by Italian avant-garde artist, Walter Marchetti, who would later become a mentor to Xane (he describes Marchetti as "both my artistic forefather and my only teacher"). He was also influenced by the sound work of other musique concrete, electroacoustic and electronic music composers of the era, as well as Great Black Music (incl. various giants of Jazz history and the AACM/Free Jazz avant-garde).
His most celebrated / notorious industrial & power electronics project is Streicher, which has been described as one of the industrial underground legends. Streicher has been called "Cult material from the darkest depths of the power electronics void. Nastiest and filthiest PE ever churned out." The Streicher aesthetic was influenced by seminal Industrial culture (Coum Transmissions / Throbbing Gristle etc), power electronics artists such as Whitehouse and Ramleh, and also primarily by Xane's involvement in Neo-Dadaism, Conceptual Art, and Fluxus
Xane was the founder of the recording labels Extreme (1980s), and Zero Cabal (1990s).
He is a published poet and holds degrees in Philosophy and Art History.
He also has a deep and abiding interest in classical music, jazz & free improvisation, Krautrock/Berlin-school electronics, and all forms of experimental music, as well as Black Metal. He has been an inveterate LP/CD/tape collector since his mid-teens, and an audiophile, always interested in striving to obtain 'the absolute sound' from his audio system.
