Freestanding neon sculpture

Paul Hartigan: The undrawn
Artis
7 October - 1 November 2009

In terms of Paul Hartigan’s career this Artis show of neon sculpture is a further development from the Revolution series of circular neon wall reliefs that he made in 2007. The seven works here continue the interest in unravelling knots of coloured light, but now instead of being spirals of several colours projecting out from opaque acrylic discs on the wall, Hartigan has made truly three-dimensional objects that are chunkily compact, and less flattened whorls.

These glowing clusters of cordlike light tumble onto the wooden floors of transparent boxes with acrylic walls. They average about 360 mm wide and look like record turntables with their high, cubed, transparent-but-tinted lids. The lid planes are not flush with the edges of the wooden ‘deck’ but recessed within.

The range of chroma is far more varied than what the images above suggest: some are whiter and icier for example, and others more varied in the temperature of their hue within each loosely poised, spiralling knot-like ball.

There about half a dozen visual variables you can think about when examining these sculptures. First of all, and most obviously, there is the range of chroma, the number of linked up colours within each twisting and buckling line cluster - the joined up sections of coloured or transparent glass within each unravelling nest.

Then there is the form of the configuration, the shape of the spiralling and reversing hovering line itself, the way it might change its alignment from vertical to diagonal, the density of its linear groupings like in a moving spring.

The tinted properties of the acrylic sheets also vary considerably. In one these are dark so that the core threads of the persimmon or orange lines glow menacingly, while their outer edges remain dark and fuzzy.

In many cases, as in the earlier Revolutions, Hartigan has drawn within the glowing line by scratching away parts of the coloured coatings he has applied to the glass tube - or exposing the spiralling transparent tube at its ends, near the caps covering the wiring that ignites the mainly argon (occasionally neon) vapour. Sometimes he incorporates the physical throbbing movement of the gas, so that it can be seen like a twisting worm at the unpainted ends, or subtly detectable within the pastel tube as a gentle pulse.

Often he plays with properties of reflection so that each work’s tumbling neon lines are repeated in diminishing and/or reversed sizes in the vertical acrylic sides, or as a soft muffled glow bounced below off the painted (or unpainted) floor of the box. These qualities in the tinted cubes knock back the sculptural aspects of the tubular forms, dematerialising them by flattening out the spatial and emphasising the linear. This makes the light less bodily, more ethereal and fragmented through repetition, paradoxically accentuating the volumetric properties of the acrylic cube – drawing attention to its flickering walls.

The main point though of Hartigan’s neon work is his love of chroma, the delight he has in manipulating intensely bright, coloured line. While these are also sculptures that provide spatial pleasures for those keen to look at them from different angles, the physicality of this sometimes intensely saturated, linear light provides wonder, even though neon now is dated technology. It doesn’t need to move to make you gasp, but you do (around each cube) if you wish to discover the pleasures of its looping forms - by visually disentangling their internal relationships. It’s a wonderful exhibition, and the best Hartigan show Auckland has had for many years.

Good at Artis

Roy Good: the Rhombus Suite
Artis
25 March - 19 April 2009

This show of Roy Good’s is about a year after his Lopdell House exhibition in Titirangi and shows his development since. It also shows the dangers of clinging to the past (I say this knowing that ‘the new’ is also widely under attack, esp. in journals like the latest Reading Room), of being besotted with the seventies and certain artists like Kenneth Noland, and formats like Noland’s elongated horizontal diamond.

Such ghosts haunt Good’s current practice. Whereas Noland used wide parallel lines running from top to bottom, regularly moving across the stretched out picture plane, Good inserts rectangular or triangular forms that float in front. He works on canvas or wooden ‘rhombi’, and the works don’t succeed. Their internal forms don’t work well spatially – especially when they ignore the edges. They suffer from a squashing compression, an inevitable result caused by short height combined with wide horizontal girth.

My view is that Good needs to have a radical rethink, and reinvent his approach to painterly materials and methodologies, if he wishes to be taken seriously as a still active painter. Perhaps he needs to abandon the stretcher and paint directly on the wall. Working with diamond shaped supports and thin glazes to render (or accentuate) planes like this is suicidal. Too derivative, far too tight, too prissy and impossibly designy.

Chromophile

Paul Hartigan: Chromophobia
Artis
17 September - 12 October 2008

Named after David Bachelor’s famous little book on the politics of colour, this is the first Hartigan solo show in Auckland for some time, and offers three varieties of work, all from recent projects shown out of town: four neon wall sculptures (‘Revolutions’); five digitally tweaked photographs printed on canvas (H-types); six plastic toy figures photographed and enlarged.

The Revolutions intrigue with their swirling spirals of knotted light, shiny circular plates, and muted reflections. As turning vectors, the glowing glass cords are a lot more complex than you initially realise, sometimes doubling back or with gaps, often with more pieces of tube or more colours than readily apparent. Often Hartigan creates counter-spirals by having thin black wiring wrapped around the tube ends. Or striations made on the pigment inside the glass tube. The smallest detail has been thoroughly considered.

The H-types combine painting, photography, sculpture and prints by printing images from Hartigan’s own archives of eighties Auckland signage, blending melancholic loss with a mood of bleached exuberant hue. Neon is now disappearing from our urban nightscapes but these treatments get reabsorbed to be seen indoors by day. Being stretched on canvas they become a strange variety of painting – but one printed from digital files.

Hartigan also has some coloured Ultrachromes of little plastic coloured figures from the early nineteenth century, that look like they are from a history board game or – as in France – a cake. Under glass the solidity of these boxed glowing plastic colonial and Maori personalities is a distraction. They look too small and too heavy with their black frames. They would work better as vertical wall hangings like say, Christine Webster’s photographs.

Of the three genres, the physicality of the Revolutions provides the most visceral excitement. The turning, reflected twists of assorted chroma (selected by referencing the named artists whose works so inspired) when brought indoors, introduce an abstract but complex optical mix into each domestic setting.