Red art, fast cars, big sales.

It sounds like a fairly accurate summary of an art fair.

Red was difficult to miss at Sydney Contemporary this year, appearing across booths with enough frequency to feel like part of the fair’s visual language.  Then there were the cars, gleaming and immaculate, positioned amongst the art, courtesy of the fair’s automotive sponsor, as just another kind of object of desire. And, of course, the sales. Works were discovered, discussed, reserved and sold within hours. ‘Red’ dots appear, quick decisions are made, celebratory champagne is poured all while a collector just bought the work you were admiring. 

Everything encourages speed.

And yet, strangely, my experience of the fair this year felt inherently slower.

The vernissage was as busy as ever. Crowds moved through Carriageworks, conversations overlapping, everybody rushing to get a first glance at the galleries they came to see and consuming far more work than anyone could properly absorb in a single evening. There was still the rush but the usual craziness felt less overwhelming to me this year and the crowds felt more like vibrant energy than sensory overload. 

After another year of technological acceleration and increasingly digital inner lives, I'm simply craving experiences that require us to be somewhere, with other people (even among the swarms), paying attention. Once I started thinking about the fair this way, I realised that many of the works and presentations shared that same quality.

Scale will always be part of the pleasure of an art fair. Big sculptures, big paintings, big installations, big champagne towers, it’s all part of the theatre. But this year, some of the presentations I found most compelling were those that didn’t seem interested in shouting over the room. At an art fair, where hundreds of artworks are competing to be seen restraint can feel surprisingly radical. The instinct might be to go bigger, but sometimes it’s the booths that do the opposite are the ones that make you stop.

Fine Arts Sydney, a perennial moment of respite within the fair, continued to lead this charge, while emerging gallery NASHA brought a similar quiet sensibility through a series of intimate paintings by Bridget Stehli. Rather than filling every possible sightline, these presentations left enough space for individual works to hold your attention, encouraging you to slow down and lean in.

Even some of the larger scale works seemed to be asking for a different kind of engagement. Mike Hewson's work brought scale back to ideas of collectivity, community and to the people who inhabit and surround the spaces he works within. Here, something physically substantial wasn't simply an object to stand back from and admire. It became an invitation to participate, gather and share, posing the idea that scale and intimacy aren't so opposing after all.

The other thing I kept noticing was ‘the figure’. Not necessarily a neat return to figurative painting in its most traditional sense, but bodies, faces, characters and traces of human presence recurring across completely different practices. From the highly stylised figures of Darren Sylvester’s photographs to the personal narratives unfolding through Renée Estée’s paintings, people seemed to be everywhere.

Jason Phu, an artist whose visual world is so often inhabited by creatures, animals and strange little critters, turned his attention to a solitary figure, with titles suggesting something more retrospective and intimate than I’d expected. Elsewhere, the body was reduced to an outline or suggestion. Sarah Drinan’s figures offered something gentler again, a soft impression of a person rather than an insistence on one. These weren’t necessarily idealised or monumental versions of ourselves, either. They were strange, funny, tender, awkward and familiar; vessels for stories about being human, with all its grit and glory.

Sydney Contemporary was still everything an art fair should be: loud, ambitious, commercial, social and occasionally excessive. But somewhere amongst all that speed, I found myself slowing down to look at figures, families, the quieter corners of booths and at the crowds of people standing together in front of things other people had made. In a cultural moment increasingly obsessed with streamlining processes, making everything faster and removing human ‘error’, the art I wanted to spend time with seemed to be asking for quite the opposite: to slow down and spend a little more time with one another.