Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to eyeCONTACT, a forum built to encourage art reviews and critical discussion about the visual culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. I'm John Hurrell its editor, a New Zealand writer, artist and curator. While Creative New Zealand and other supporters are generously paying me and other contributors to review exhibitions over the following year, all expressed opinions are entirely our own.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Chromatic Slivers


Tilman: Lost and Found; Concrete Findings
rm 103
14 August - 30 August 2008

Belgian artist and curator, Tilman, is pretty well unknown in this country, but he now has a show of his own work in rm 103 and is about to present an exhibition of thirty international abstractionists in The Physics Room in Christchurch called My Eyes Keep me in Trouble. Both projects look very exciting.

His four portable paintings in Auckland look like the above image but use stronger pastel (lolly) colours, with two circular holes cut near the two top corners. They look like the rectangular palettes that oil painters use. He also has a large yellowy-green wall painting painted directly on the opposite wall.

Tilman's movable paintings are mouth-wateringly gorgeous. Sexy in the way the front plane of colour interacts with slivers of other coloured panels sandwiched behind it. Little skinny bits of thin rectangular sections peek out at you from the sides. You can barely see them from the front. They are reminiscent in their delicate linear (but chromatically punchy) nuances of some of the works of Imi Knoebel, but lighter (in weight) and smaller.

This is a fabulous show. The best work I personally have ever seen in rm 103. It’s a class act in one small room. Hats off to rm 103 for presenting it. It’s stunning.

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