Jonas Balsaitis exhibited three huge paintings at the Pinacotheca Gallery in Melbourne in 1972. At the time, it was viewed as an important landmark in Australian art.

Titled Metron I, II and III and all painted in acrylics in 1971-72, the three paintings as a unity quickly vanished from sight and found their homes in the Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

The survey exhibition of Jonas Balsaitis’ work at the Drill Hall Gallery reunites the paintings for the first time since their debut more than half a century ago. When they were first exhibited, the most influential art critic in the Melbourne art scene at the time, Patrick McCaughey, hailed them in a review in The Age under the headline ‘Impact in three original works’.

He spoke of “the shock of originality” and found that they excite “as only the new and ambitious can in art … Lingering systemic patterns give way to more mobile, flexible surfaces. Balsaitis looks freer, less encumbered by stylistic imperatives than younger artists felt four or five years ago”.

Jonas Balsaitis, Metron II, 1971, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 305 x 396.7 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1972. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery

Today, the paintings still look strong and unencumbered, bold but intricate and bearing the stamp of the 1970s thinking. These huge canvases pulsate with texture and geometry. They appear as highly structured and at the same time dynamic and kinetic. The Metron paintings grew out of collage that the artist made by cutting up pictures from a Time-Life article sliced into horizontal bands and then progressively abstracted through the application of many layers of sprayed acrylic paint. These painting dominate the exhibition and remain a highlight in Balsaitis’s oeuvre.

Balsaitis is one of those heroic modernist painters who burst onto the Melbourne art stage in the late 1960s and was lionised throughout the 1970s but then gradually faded from prominence.

Jonas Balsaitis, Metron III, 1972, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 305 x 396.7 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Purchased, 1972. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery

Balsaitis is Lithuanian but was born in Germany in 1948 and arrived in Australia the following year. Settling in Melbourne, he studied art at the Preston Institute of Technology, then the Prahran Technical College and finally the National Gallery School of Art. He was an heir of the ‘colour field’ painters and, together with a number of his teachers and other artists of his generation, including Dale Hickey, Lesley Dumbrell, Trevor Vickers and Robert Hunter, developed his own theories of art-making accompanied by some arcane philosophies.

This exhibition traces the artist’s interest in information imaging systems, at a time when this was far from popular, and also examines the artist translating his paintings into film through a hugely laborious process. Painting and film animation remained parallel streams in the artist’s work.

Balsaitis moved from early tight abstract patterns to looser and more animated forms and, in more recent years, explores minimal and monochromatic forms. A painting such as his Yellow Pix’s, 1996, may have had its origins in a technique that Balsaitis devised of applying paint to the canvas and then washing it off and using the traces of residual pigment as an outline for subsequent forms. It is one of those beautiful deceptively simple works that progressively grows on you as you enter the painting.

Jonas Balsaitis, Yellow Pix’s, 1996, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 121.8 x 173 cm, Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery

Jonas Balsaitis: Analogue is at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Kingsley Street, Acton, until 13 April, from Wednesday to Sunday. from 10 am to 5 pm.