The work Mayfair: (Untitled) Four Signs for Joe Birch attests to Robert MacPherson's deep interest in a serial poetry of repetition, with its four simple and similar panels, only varying in the single word at the bottom of each. There is a logic of animation here, a group of related images to be read in sequence, perhaps from the window of a car moving along the highway and designed to get attention by the small differences between them. If this were a poem, presented as text only, it would need four lines to provide the pause between each fragment - while in the sign at the roadside, or here in Macpherson's painting the separate boards provide that necessary pause and emphasize the beat within the repeated image.

MacPherson has long been interested in the vocabularies of the specialized, the offhand and the familiar, concentrating on the particular, even obscure, detail of the highly discrete and polished language of groups bound by their sharp awareness of what others fail to see. An artist who has been one of Australia's key minimalists, and has explored at length the Greenbergian logic of painting refined to its barest essentials, he has also determinedly not been contained by that hermetic logic. He twists, instead, taking steps in directions that would be almost incomprehensible to high modernists and pulling in the language of the vernacular and an abiding awareness of the context in which is used. He frequently dedicates his works, via initials in their titles, or in rare cases by the use of a full name, linking them to friends, colleagues, contacts or to figures of legend and Australian myth. This is at once to stress his paintings have personal meaning - with the rationale for the homage paid in his titles known (perhaps only so) to the artist ? and that they operate within a social space. These pictures do not exist solely in and for an art world but, as we are reminded in his dedication, through an extended web of social connection and interaction.

The appeal for MacPherson of his many sign works must lie in part in the role of such signs as markers of an Australian landscape - one delineated by human presence and use, rather than of a romanticized and depopulated countryside - and in the poetry of the vernacular - and surely, fundamentally in the economy of means they display. Throughout his art we see his interest in the significance of labor; the work of eye and hand and tool; the importance of skill and oft repeated gesture; and the understanding of the task, however simple, that brings mastery through long familiarity. The models for these works can be seen as ur-signs: the task well understood and the object and image reduced to its simplest and most basic expression. John Barrett-Lennard