Forget watercolour

Simon Esling: Constructs
Anna Bibby
8 July - 2 August 2009

The ten A4 sized watercolour works Esling presents here (occasionally with collage) could be illustrations on pages for a book, they seem so consistent, so purposeful and loaded with intent – and not open in interpretative possibility, or surrealist. The presence of sinews or bone in most implies the artist has a narrative in mind, some sort of reading involving bodily, muscular sensations.

If this is so, perhaps making delicate illustrative watercolours is not the bravest way of approaching a phenomenological content, to think about the mover’s prioperception. Why not consider Robert Morris, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and make an installation an audience can directly experience? Make a practice that embodies a theory (literally and viscerally incorporating movement), rather than trying to picture it. Something working with agency, and not passive or detached.

About half of these works on paper are framed and under glass. The rest are positioned under suspended clip-boards, with no logic distinguishing the two. The artist is sending out contradictory signals because frames and glass mean 'hands off' and clip-boards imply you can remove from the clip if you so wish.

There are also two sorts of image. One is collage-based and integrated spatially so that the picture plane and different depths of field lock in well together. The other has shallow and deep spaces awkwardly juxtaposed so that the transitions across edges are abrupt and jarring. Often there are images of trucks or planes as symbols for human bodily motion.

I don’t think this show is an aesthetic success but I admire its consistency and quality of exploration. There is a sense of a mind at work testing different symbols or codes with different illusory spaces. However the work is hampered by the restrictions of illustration, which it needs to abandon in order to be much more immersive. If only artist and audience could start wallowing in real space, to be consciously considering that, and aware of itself consciously considering that.

Herne Bay show

Group Exhibition
Anna Bibby
11 February - 8 March 2008

The dozen artists in this group show present a sort of ‘After New Year’ celebration: a display of stock to kick-start 09’s season. While there are no real surprises it is a good chance to see Anna Bibby’s taste - (craft–oriented, domestic scale), if you are not familiar with her shows already – and to ponder what her artists do. Lots of them seem to like to make bird imagery. Apart from Des Helmore and Tim Thatcher, they all have avian subject-matter somewhere.

In some ways this display is more conservative than some of the Bibby solo artist shows. Heather Straka is represented by a rendered chicken wing, whereas her recent exhibition was of dissected body parts and not for the ultra-squeamish. I say ‘ultra’ because the images were still slightly tasteful. They weren’t photographic and stickily messy – though they were blackly humorous. In that context this chicken wing (extraordinary looking with its little stalactite flaps of loose skin) was a bizarre guffaw, and remains so here.

Jim Dennison and Leanne Williams cast-glass birds surprise not because of their cute angular forms but because of their translucent colour (delicate blues, greens and browns) that often seems deep inside the small glass masses, and casually positioned. This colour has a hovering independence from form, a freedom – and is birdlike in itself.

Megan Hansen-Knarhoi’s Flock presents 26 pairs of woolly, stylised hands, clapping in unison on the wall as if in a soft Killeen cutout. They applaud themselves like swirling, noisy birds – prodding the viewer’s aural imagination as well as visual.

In one of the front windows, Martin Poppelwell’s ceramic bird on a skull, with its buttery coloration and overlaid coal-black grid, is a strikingly combination of whimsy with sensuality. Focussed and uncluttered, it is unlike his scappier and looser work on paper in the other window.

Sam Mitchell’s acrylic paintings on clear Perspex dazzle with her technique of painting under the surface in ‘reverse’ order, so that detail is applied before planes of colour, covered from behind so not to be obliterated. Mitchell’s smaller forms (such as naked ladies, budgies etc.) are more successfully rendered than the large portraits they are positioned on. The little images have a fluid line and buoyant energy missing in the stiffer, bigger, blue visages.

Probably the most striking (and heretically non-feathered) paintings in the show are by Desmond Helmore and Tim Thatcher, works that celebrate the viscosity of paint while containing its fluidity within tight spatial structures. Helmore is the more austere of the two, a remarkably honed sensibility of exquisite precision. Thatcher, much looser, has larger less illustrative works, and uses a deeper space, but is just as controlled in organisation, though not in style of application.

The photorealism of Emily Wolfe is distinctive, but not the sole point, for it is accompanied by an exact sense of scale for each canvas. This sense of intimacy with the viewer is a vital ingredient, more important than her meticulous detail or plasticity of form. On the other hand, Gavin Hurley’s stencil-like portraits, with their airbrushed contours, floating shapes and skilled tonal control, comment on representation itself as a process, more than say, historical subject matter as content. Style is his subject, and narrative readings appear to be a red herring. He creates a celebration of flatness and contrivance, a relishing of artificiality.

Straka show

Heather Straka: (Life) Still
Anna Bibby
11 November - 29 November 2008

When it comes to eating, although I’m no vegan, I’m not a rabid carnivore either. But I have a sweet tooth, so I was somewhat perturbed to discover my stomach rumbling while examining Heather Strakas’ paintings of dissected body parts. These she studied in part of the Otago Medical School in Dunedin, while being this year’s Frances Hodgkins Fellow.

The images in question were of sliced cross-sections of human brain, delicately coloured – and perhaps a little bleached by formalin. Despite the occasional straggly vein, they look, I realised later, unnervingly similar to slices of ornate ice cream cake I used to greatly enjoy as a child at birthday parties. It’s a particularly delicious variety of creamy ice cream that I suspect is unobtainable now.

The other paintings of severed fingers, intact eyes and various organs are not so yummy. As with Straka’s style of image making, everything is tidy with no bloody, horrid torn or raggedy bits. And in a soft and dark umber-grey light that, with a few drops or puddles of strange secretions, is slightly mysterious.

Straka has also included several paintings of dead roses and orchids, with fallen wilted petals, as well as one painting of a clammy chicken wing from the supermarket. A very funny surprise in this context.

There are also some great erotic portraits of a glowering, androgenous young woman: one frontal with tightly bound breasts; another sternly looking over a twisted back. She is described by the artist’s beautifully worded, evil title, as a ‘human tissue monger’. I think that means she is in charge of one of the dissecting rooms.

I normally dislike Straka’s portraits because of their Lindauer–like stylisation and the smooth contours of the heads’ edges. The silky smoothness of the dark surrounding space upsets me. These though, along with the grisly dissection works, I really like. Perhaps it is the humour which gets to me, bubbling way down below the immensely serious subject-matter, only to occasionally, very briefly, rise to the surface.

Religious landscapes

Tony Lane
Anna Bibby
26 July - 16 August 2008

The ten paintings here (two in the ‘shop’ window, eight in the gallery proper) make up a typical Tony Lane exhibition. The faded, mock-fresco, worn patina with delicate layers of thinly applied oil paint; the allusions to altarpieces and the sacramental with the gold and aluminium leaf; the heavy-handed use of religious symbolism that shrewdly fuses Italian art history with McCahon; the skimpily (read ‘sensitively’) drawn line rendering those symbols; the pompous, wide, gilded frames – all the classic Lane trademarks are there.

In earlier years he took more chances – such as making oddly proportioned paintings that were long and very skinny – so his unorthodox compositions provided surprise. Even if they didn’t work you could tell he was trying to take religious painting somewhere new. However then, as now, the parts usually didn’t seem to add up to a resolved whole. You got details of sections (like repeated folds of fabric) that looked intriguing in isolation as a horizontal McCahonesque slice, but which didn’t end up within a cohesive unity with any impact. The dynamic initially gained somehow dissipated so the finished work looked anaemic.

Lane’s main problem is the palaver he creates around the physical objects he has painted on, using wide frames and screens that isolate his image-laden rectangles within cocoons of otherworldliness. They seem like a compensatory mechanism to distract from the ordinariness of his symbolic material. He needs the intrusive framing for a pumped up presentation to overcook the images. It parallels the overkill within the image production itself, the use of more glittering underpainted surfaces than necessary to support the desperate decorativeness of his symbols.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, his images are interesting, even fascinating. This artist is good at making tablecloth folds look like cliff-faces or repeated parts of tree trunks. Natural and cultural forms blend, while flimsy forms end up looking rock-solid and the normally robust become spindly. Lane is in essence a landscape painter. Even domestic interiors use landscape conventions. That is part of his attraction, a vulnerable and tentative dreamlike poetry – mixed with an unlikely (but now obvious) combination of a clunky Giottoesque mass with a weedy, flimsy, Kleelike line.

Don't apologise

Martin Poppelwell: Please excuse the mess
Anna Bibby, Auckland
4th March - 22nd March 2008

The last two spaces of Anna Bibby’s were particularly striking as places to visit to enjoy her chosen artists, yet this new Jervois Rd venue is just so forgettable. It‘s hard to imagine it is the same dealer. While on an obvious level this is clearly not my business, the building's pokey, mousey ambience affects a visitor’s perception of the art. It makes no effort to excite.

And Martin Poppelwell is normally a whizzo draftsman, clever designer and wonderful ceramicist but this is a lacklustre show. (For any space.) The paintings are typically eclectic - Tom Kreisler here, Carroll Dunham there, dashes of Guston thrown in – but holey-moley, the display lacks focus. It’s a jumble of bits. Not a mess though – just disparate.

However the small etchings are interesting with their garbled texts, geometric shapes and delicate detail. A room of them alone would have been great. They and the ceramics represent Poppelwell’s truest voice.

One of the two calligraphic pots has written on it: bad artists always admire each other’s work. You can say a lot about that statement, which implies good artists are somehow different, but they are not, are they?

So whom is Poppelwell thinking of as ’bad’? Kreisler, Guston and Dunham were/are very good artists, right? So while he has gifts….