Running out of time

Darryn George: Rarohiko
Gow Langsford
28 April - 22 May 2010

With this new Gow Langsford exhibition Darryn George carries on with some compositional aspects of the ‘abstract’ wall painting that he presented last December at Te Tuhi. With that work the image (entitled Rehita) could be described as a diagrammatic drawing of a bookcase, with books lying on their sides on its shelves.

George is interested in systems of knowledge and how cultures accumulate and store it. With Rarohiko (the Maori word for computer) there are similarities to the earlier show but the ‘Maori’ red is mostly gone, as is the wide airy flat space. Instead the motifs are stacked on top of each other within a boxlike computer screen and allude to systems of stored files (digital or in cabinets) or to tabs attached to folders.

The alignment of space within each work varies. Sometimes it is conventional perspective, occasionally aerial perspective, now and then orthogonal. The same sized rectangular tabs are stacked vertically, or descend moving to the bottom right, or else they recede. There is a sense of these precisely arranged oblongs being symbols for containers of information.

With the Countdown series there is a focus on ten recited numbers that seems a tribute to McCahon’s 1965 Numerals series, plus a visual tip of the hat to the English Gothic ‘Gang-patch’ lettering of Shane Cotton and perhaps the delicate ink drawings of John Bevan Ford.

As the title states, George here is using a line of small canvases to list their numbers backwards in diminishing denominations. He is not using them to surprise the eye with unexpected placements (as McCahon might do) - only showing them decreasing within a sequenced row. This creates a sense of the apocalyptic.

There is an abstract distancing with this predetermined arrangement, supplemented by a pulse of alternating red and black footers and the alternating arepa/omeka (alpha/omega) names of Jesus from the Book of Revelations. They are ominous whilst also decorative. Furthermore the subtle (though I suspect coincidental) optical mixing of finely linear coloured koru forms in their backgrounds introduces a pleasing chance component – makes the work less icy and more spontaneous.

I think the Rarohiko canvases work better than the more intricate, much smaller Countdown paintings. Their size has more impact, while the varied experiments with a stark compositional layout and the ideas about digital information storage - blended with traditional Maori motifs - are more satisfying and unique.

What is interesting is the tension created by George’s presentation of these two series together. One type seems to be about building a better future through the accumulation of knowledge, and the other is saying that time is running out, that the benefits of using such knowledge may never get the chance to be appreciated. George might be referring to the planet’s ecological demise or he might be thinking of The Second Coming. Perhaps both.

Darryn George at Te Tuhi

Darryn George: Rehita
Te Tuhi: The Drawing Wall
12 December 2009 – 10 March 2010

If you put a gun to my head and demanded to know what my favourite form of visual art was, and I was forced to come up with something, I’d probably say “Grid paintings.” Used to make them centuries ago, and still enjoy looking at (and thinking about) the genre. Mercifully there is still a bit of it about.

So this matrix by Darryn George is one that’s features a deep matt red wall. It's organised around what seem to be twelve modules of four vertical units by three horizontal ones. Except these twelve units aren’t identical. They have small skinny horizontal rectangles alternating between the bottom left and bottom right corners of the larger oblongs.

Have a peek at the above photos. You might think, why didn’t John describe them as a grid of six flipped double-units that is two by three? Well look again, it is actually quite complicated. There is a thin ‘frieze’ of three linked slivers of rectangle at the very top, right where you least expect to see them. That’s a cunning device to accentuate the upper and lower edges, bring in vertical symmetry and lock the design optically onto the wall. Otherwise with the dominant retinally advancing red, the top edge you'd get from a solely twelve unit combination would seem to float away while the bottom remained anchored. Those three upper white and black motifs are essential.

Being Nga Puhi, George has used the traditional Maori colour colours of red, white and black, and if you really, really insisted on a rudimentary narrative, you could say they represented bookshelves with the smaller lower motifs depicting books lying flat on their sides so that you see only their spines. A comment about the desirability of recording traditional knowledge before it disappears, perhaps?

The work is beautifully designed, taking advantage of thin elegant white lines to bring a quality of light and delicate exuberance. Executed by a technician it has none of the deliberately stippled and encrusted paint found on George’s usual canvases. This is a notably flat surface.

This is a wonderful multi-layered work; visually not too busy but not too empty either. It’s precisely and airily balanced so that there is no possibility of clutter at intersecting vertical and horizontal white lines. It’s expansive too. The perfect dynamic of minimal patterning to hold your attention.

Forty years on

Darryn George / Shane Cotton / Ralph Hotere: Black to Black
Gow Langsford
16 September - 10 October 2009

In this mixture of primary and secondary selling opportunities through sampling almost three generations of Maori painters we see three Georges, three Hoteres and one Cotton.

The solo Cotton looks odd in this company because of its colour, figurative imagery, and number. The Georges seem grandiose and pompous. Too much extended shiny black surface and not enough substance. But the Hoteres. They are a very good reason to visit this show. Forty years old they look like they were just made yesterday. Impeccable. Made when this artist was at his peak. He used the influence of Ad Reinhardt to create, via added glowing linear colour, something remarkable.

His three works are so compact, and devoid of pretension. The one with the Manhire text of ‘Melody’ organised in a vertical column on the left - with alternating words of dark blue and matt black - has vertical tear-like, cascading coloured lines as a foil on the right.

Hotere's lacquer on board work with subdued circle and vertical lines is also worth spending time with - due to its remarkable gloss and impenetrable depth. It is thankfully free of the buffing that ruined (in my view) many of his similar works – such as those in Taranaki.

The third one, a warmer grey-black work with delicate, pulsing concentric circles is a treat too. There is something about the fineness of the curved, arching lines and knocked-backed hues that thrills. Christchurch Art Gallery have one that is very similar.

The Gow Langsford catalogue notes for this show talk a great deal about McCahon, but McCahon when glossy was never pristine - always gritty. Hotere with his industrial lacquer was quite different. New Zealand art was never to be as pure as this again.

Colour Cathedral

Darryn George: Pulse
Christchurch Art Gallery (William A. Sutton Room)
9 March – August 2008

Darryn George’s installation here is light years more exciting than his recent, related, Gow Langsford painting exhibition in Auckland which was hampered by the muddled variety of its images, its overworked textures and too complicated Christian/Maori symbolism.

This Christchurch show was executed by professional sign painters working directly onto the walls, and is exciting because of its physicality. It is an amazing experience to walk around the huge room, the designed motifs are so rhythmically and chromatically intense. The super saturated colour gets absorbed by every pore in your body, and the intense walls, the front one repeating the number ‘Waru’ (eight: the eight day of the week, a mystical, spiritually focussed day), pulse with an octane energy that pleasurably steamrolls over you.

This is a particularly successful treatment of this space. Hopefully it is the first of many such spectacles to come.

Forget your cinnamon buns and chocolate

Stations of the Cross: an Easter Exhibition
Curated by Joanna Trezise and Jaenine Parkinson
Gus Fisher Gallery
14 - 24 March 2008

The Gus Fisher is trying to cover all bases at the moment, but the fact is it is not a good venue for contemporary art. The floor is a real distraction that kills sculpture, as do the venue's decorative inlaid doors and domed space two-dimensional work. The place needs a proper makeover, but as it is a historic, protected building, such a sensible and functional modification is not likely to happen.

The exhibitions now also tend to be fusty. The recent Adele Younghusband and (current) Gabrielle Hope shows for example were/are excruciatingly inconsistent affairs, and over the last year or two the programme has become more conservative.

On hearing that this Easter show of specifically contemporary work was commissioned by the Presbyterian Church, I didn’t know what to expect – especially as the Stations are a particularly Catholic concept. However the curators involved, Joanna Trezise and Jaenine Parkinson, spring a few stimulating surprises.

‘Hallelujah!’ first of all for there being no McCahon, Smither or Harris works. Their over-exposed crucifixion or ‘Station’ paintings are thankfully nowhere to be seen, and the fifteen commissioned artists selected for the fifteen stations along JC’s bodily trajectory make up a peculiarly mixed bag, but there are some treats. It would have been much better using the whole gallery and including some film or video, but never mind.

Fifteen artists with fifteen hugely varied approaches in media and attitude is quite a gamble. The fragmentation is not resolved by the thematic structure but it doesn’t seem to matter. The many contrasts and vehement oppositions bring an unexpected richness. Instead of Christian propaganda we have here a true forum, a notion that the art world often embraces in conversation but which it rarely puts into practice. Many of these artists appear to be non-believers. Others broadcast their commitment to the Christian faith. This ideological jostling makes the show refreshing in its candour.

Five works in particular I found physically and mentally engaging.

Peter Madden’s sculpture has one of his ubiquitous, gold leaf covered, plastic skulls placed on a tall plinth of shiny purple plastic. As he has also coated the Gus Fisher glass doors with gold leaf, it is not until you have opened them and entered that you are suddenly confronted by this vertical figure. It represents Jesus, clad in a sarcastically ‘royal’ robe, about to be condemned. The intense colour makes it quite a visceral experience and a superb start to the ‘Station‘ tour.

Further down the sequence at the Tenth Station, Niki Hastings-McFall has another skeletal Jesus standing on a green hill of foliage and flowers. Awaiting execution and stripped of his clothes, he is holding a vinegar soaked sponge and a straw. There is a lightbox under the plastic leaves and they glow gorgeously. The absent flesh and clothes merge into one as a metaphor about the transience of life, youth and beauty.

John Pule’s series of painted hardcover tomes, continue a number of projects where he attacks the destructive influence of Christianity in the Pacific region, using written or drawn post-colonial narratives. His set of 14 Christian guidebooks are given raw, repainted covers that are virulently scathing of missionary-induced guilt and despair. I prefer these to Pule’s paintings, though those are hard-hitting too. The books are more confrontational, and don’t bury their anger in a mass of decorative detail. Their inclusion brings some gritty intellectual credibility to this show.

Darryn George is a hard-edge abstractionist pretending to be a Christian-Maori symbolist. The reverse is stated in the catalogue, and understandably so, for he often clutters works with symbolic elements even if they detract visually. Yet if put on the spot, George would probably rather construct an elegant design than tell you a morally uplifting story. He loves form. His ‘The Women of Jerusalem Weep For Jesus’ is a seductive though deceptively simple painting, with particularly rarefied compositional control.

The placing of Jesus’ body in the tomb is the theme explored by Hamish Tocher in his wonderful projection on to the gallery ceiling via six over-head projectors. The various foreshortened actors look like they are standing on a high glass sheet and participating in a Mannerist mural. In terms of Biblical narratives these figures seem to obliquely allude to another story, that of a vision experienced by the hungry disciple Peter, where on a rooftop in a strange city God delivers out of the sky a sailcloth sheet bearing live animals to be eaten (Acts 10:11). The confusion between a food-laden sheet and Jesus’ corpse wrapped in a burial shroud makes an inadvertent pun about the Eucharist and the eating of Jesus’ body.

What believers would make of such humour I do not know. However the range of work in this show makes it worth a visit for anyone - whatever their religious inclinations. Naturally it is on over the entire Easter period, even public holidays.

Too rigid

Darryn George: Pukapuka
Gow Langsford, Auckland
4 March - 28 March 2008

Darryn George is well known as a Maori painter in this country, but you know what, his earlier sculptural works are so much better. In the mid nineties he made a series of red/black/white sculptural wall reliefs, heraldic in nature, depicting motifs that examined colonial history from the Māori point of view. They had a fluidity of line and an organic quality that has long been lost.

George’s paintings in comparison have a busyness and rigidity, a harshness induced by their tonal contrast and geometry. Overcooked and wooden, they seem too earnest and too literal in their symbolism (a strange thing to say about ‘abstract’ works, I know.) Their excessive narrative layering makes them try too hard, and consequently they flounder.

Let me give an example: his use of thick white 3D paint in the borders is awkward – visually a mix of Jonathan Lasker and Max Ernst’s decalcomania. In the gallery’s very fine discussion of this show by Shelley Jahnke-Bishop, she mentions it is done to emulate the chisel marks of carving, but they actually don’t look chisel-like. The work is spoiled by its symbolic intent, which even if rendered impeccably, would still only overload the content. The ‘footnotes’ would have replaced the ‘essay’. The show’s title means ‘book’ so my literary comparison is apt.

The odd thing is that the best work of the show is in the gallery’s Wellesley Street window (bottom image above). It has an intriguing literal quality, looking like two rows of panels leaning against a wall. It also is comparatively simple, having no complicated background kowhaiwhai or tukutuku patterns. Plus there are grey panels that in the context of all the red, black and white, suddenly become visually refreshing.

This sounds like I’m trying to remove all the Māori components from George’s work, but not at all. I’m just advocating visual subtlety, and hinting that he could come at it from another direction. To my pakeha eyes it seems a bit heavy-handed and market-driven; devoid of intellectual risks. The earlier wave of ‘Māori painters’ like Peter Robinson and Shane Cotton are much more adventurous in comparison.