There is a scene in Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums in which animmaculately stacked and colossal pile of porn videos appears, looming suddenly in the foreground. This painstakingly constructed tower of VHS tapes is out of focus, blurred into soft geometric shapes, still quite obvious that it is an immense stack of porn movies. but like Clint’s work it looks to have been made with such attention, care and patience that it would be wrong to leave these tapes collecting dust in a basement somewhere. Two Miguel Calderon paintings crop up in the same part of the movie and steal the scene from the two actors onscreen: Even though throughout the rest of the film Owen and Luke Wilson’s characters appear larger than life, in this scene these two huge canvases – and their ridiculously over the top images of bully boys in monster masks and denim- totally dominate each shot, distracting from the Wilson brothers’ dialogue and creating a strange and twisted conversation of their own. Rather than just becoming background props the paintings and the stack of porn are allowed to take on a life of their own, to become characters in their own right.

Billy’s paintings aren’t so over the top as the Calderon pieces, but in their post-formalist way they also refuse to be seen as background imagery or aesthetic gap-filler, playing the space and the canvas, proudly showing the marks of their making. Last here representing MOP Projects, Billy has gone on to help start up Sydney’s newest artists-run-space, Snow, and as we write Billy is jetting out here from the sunny side of the Tasman with a suitcase full of paintings for you all to see.