His Response Paintings exhibition, which opens at the La Trobe Visual Arts Centre on Saturday afternoon, includes the work on which the gallery’s View Street facade is based. 

The Melbourne creative won the right to design the entryway last September, and he now has five canvasses inside the art space too. 

His collection is characterised by a minimal color palette applied to the surface with unconventional tools like fire hydrants or high-pressure spray guns.   

“It’s definitely meant to look fun, (but) it’s a pretty gruelling process in terms of the preparation in the days leading up to the painting itself, and the clean up and recovery,” he said.

Mr Keating said he aspired to create both imposing and meditative works, a description that neatly fits curator Michael Brennan’s choices for the Bendigo exhibition.

Mr Brennan, who has known Mr Keating for almost a decade, said works like Gravity System Response #1 – the work on which the facade is based – demonstrated the artist’s control of his materials.

“What’s really needed to make these artworks successful is for the artist to know when to stop or pull back, and not to try and dictate it too closely,” Mr Brennan said.  

A video installation also included in the exhibition shows him creating a mural on the side of a 100-metre long industrial building on Melbourne’s urban boundary.  

Mr Keating said urban sprawl was an issue that continued to cause him concern. 

“The painting is about bringing the building back into the landscape it’s newly been built on,” he said.

“I believe that, architecturally, they could be considered more, and also I equally worry about the rapid scale of expansion outside of that boundary.”

Mr Brennan said the video “provided a glimpse of what might’ve happened in the studio”.