Playing chasing with paint

Simon Ingram and James Cousins: TAG
Gow Langsford
9 January - 23 January 2010

This is a clever idea: putting Simon Ingram’s complex systems but optically stable results alongside James Cousins' comparatively simple processes and convulsively frenetic outcomes; especially if the two painters (two friends who share the same dealer) play chasing (or tag wrestling) with application techniques, darting around each other’s inversely related work methods – testing unexpected approaches and extrapolating out and around their regular procedures.

We have here eight experimental works sorted into four sets of two. Because the artists have organised the hang so their work goes abbabaab, no one personality dominates. Ingram (a) leads in from the left, Cousins (b) from the right.

So after deciding to start from Gow Langsford's street front window and move in pairs towards the inner space, the first two we find deal with over and under the grid or the applied masking tape. Cousins’ Closed Cast has its zigzagging, spastic masking tape configuration left intact with its chromatically modulated plane of brown and blue paint lying on top undisturbed. What lies underneath is a mystery. Could even be the same colours.

Ingram’s much smaller, earlier work nearby, Empire, suggests this might be the case. His rule based grids of wee squares have the same colours applied underneath and on top, with some rectangular edges crisp and clean, others wobbly and covered by brushmarks.

The second two paintings play with movement. Ingram’s Untitled has its yellow daubs of oil paint disturbed by a bumped canvas while his Lego robot is actually applying the pigment. The support is methodically manipulated by hand in conjunction with the activity of the machine.

Cousins’ accompanying YF4 is wild. He has taken the masking tape off and while the surrounding top coat is still wet, and frenetically agitated it with a brush – blending it into the underlying layer. The angular masked lines are mixed with a more fluid tumbling movement.

The third pair look at subtractive and additive processes. Ingram’s Riser has thick red paint applied on to a linen stretcher on which is drawn a pencilled grid. In some areas that paint has been later removed with turps so you can detect white squares beneath and blue underpainting.

Cousins’ nearby pink Drought is a lot simpler. An L-shaped blue line follows the left and bottom edges while in the top left-hand corner a large square of blue paint has been blurrily removed.

The last couple of works look at manual application. In Jardin Moderne, Ingram has made a series of dramatically sweeping red diagonal and horizontal lines brushed on by hand and not using his robot. It looks like a very delicate Franz Kline.

In response Cousins has added an extra layer of thick yellow paint over an old work completed two years previously, so you can see slivers of the earlier painting peeking through at the stretcher edges. The sticky oily pigment of Cool Yellow has been applied vigorously and agitated with a narrow brush.

This exhibition is the start of a new Initiative series for Gow Langsford, one devoted to experimental painting projects. It’s a great idea. If they are all as good as this, we have a lot to look forward to.

Entangled striated layerings

James Cousins: Signal
Gow Langsford
10 March - 3 April 2009

James Cousins used to paint landscapes looked at through a grid that repeated a regularly sized, horizontal module. Now he uses an overlaid, asymmetrical, striated ‘screen’ that zigzags in circular sweeps with spiky parallel lines. It references Op and Pop - Vasarely’s ribbony, shallow grids spliced into Lichtenstein’s (or Johns’) sprawling brushstrokes.

Peeking through these angular masked curtains are landscapes or close–ups of trees. Sometimes on top or in (the curtains that is) are oily Baconlike smears and flicks; three overlapping spatial fields that interweave and coalesce. Unlike say Andrew Barber’s romantic landscapes, the spiky forms make Cousin’s vistas oddly threatening and crystaline hard – as if mutilated metallic sheeting were suspended in front of the depicted scene. The confusion from blending the foreground and background spaces brings forward the picture plane while also offering slices of a receding ‘window’.

This tension has similarities to some of Escher’s images, where reflections in a puddle compete with the textures of the muddy road around it. With Cousins there is a shattered fragmentation of the painted field which nevertheless remains intact. These very visceral works are also oddly cerebral in their premeditated order, especially the bigger examples. The sharp angles that make them menacing and violent look peculiar when combined with chocolate box scenes that could have come from the Kelliher Art Prize. Cousins is on to something unusual here with this mix of sentimentality with the most brutally industrial of scratch marks. It will be fascinating to see where it takes him.

Brmmm, brmmm

Group Show: Clock the Ton
Gow Langsford
9 December - 30 December 2008

Nifty title this, for those determined to race down country roads at more than 100 mph. An unusually hoony moniker for a Xmas show. It also means you can count 100 works here, each no bigger than 600 square millimetres. It postulates the premise that size is not the same as scale, that formal and emotional impact can’t be measured with a ruler or light meter. Really though it is about sales not perception. Who’d dream otherwise?

Represented here are eighteen artists: Ball, Cotton, Cousins, George, Frizzell, Gimblett, Hight, Hughes, Ingram, Maddox, Maguire, Maugham, McWhannell, Millar, Murado, Nitsche, Paterson, and Pule. Though they average out at five works each, some in fact only have one (McWhannell, Hughes and Cotton) and others eighteen (Antonio Murada).

I normally hate salon hangs and I especially hate Christmas shows. But this seems like one work, a particularly crazy composite by some deranged artist influenced by Killeen. The odd thing is that the randomness and density of the hang is perversely entertaining. It is not easy to compare, say, all the Gimbletts or Murados, or Maddoxes. You have to concentrate to find them and then come up with an opinion about which work would best represent that artist, should that item somehow appear in your fantasized ideal Christmas stocking at the end of your bed.

It also allows you to ferret out recent changes in artists’ practices. You can examine say James Cousins’ optically unpredictable, zigzaggy fields, or the peculiar aluminium shapes Judy Millar is now working on that have a concave contour included. These edges pointedly enclose as a negative form, the plane of the supporting wall - and seem to indicate the underpinning architectural context.

If you want to temporarily forget your aesthetic sensibilities - and be like me a nosey parker when it comes to artists - check out this show and indulge your drifting, wandering eye.

Is it for sale?

Group Show featuring ‘Sacred XIV’ (2005) by Damien Hirst.
Gow Langsford, 26 Lorne St. Auckland
26 May - 31 May 2008 (one week only)

They throw a great opening party at Gow Langsford, and last night’s event to launch the new Lorne St space was no exception. But of course (ahem) one should ignore the people (it was packed) and focus on the art and the space, which seems bigger, more rectangular but less interesting (no intersecting side gallery) – and with some thick structural columns that visually intervene. It’s an excellent location just down from the New Gallery.

The million dollar Hirst, of a dagger in a preserved pig’s heart, looks smaller than expected. Quite unprepossessing, but a very clever take on the tattooed symbol for love that’s been betrayed. Using a pig’s body part as a trope for one’s own emotional centre seems a ruefully cynical comment on the self and any agency that accompanies it.

Visual speaking, possibly the sculpture by Tony Cragg and painting by James Cousins are the most successful, both items dealing with twisting layers of stacked strata. The genius of Cragg at exploring new types of plasticity is well known, but Cousins in his painting is now creating strange new tumbling forms very different from the gridded landscapes he is more known for.

Chris Heaphy has a huge black and white painting on the main wall. It’s a real whopper, but far too big for its fragmented visual content, and over reaching its ambition. A bit like Stephen Bambury’s Ideogram painting in ‘Very Peculiar Practice’ a few years ago, where the work’s size could not sustain a finely tuned dynamic. Heaphy’s image is of quoted Richard Killeen silhouettes that look as if they have been composed by A. R. Penck. His ‘skull’ painting in the office (also ‘Killeens’ but positioned by ‘Tony Cragg’) is much more successful in its scale, though skulls now are like hearts, a dreadfully overused symbol. That is why Hirst is a good artist and Heaphy, one could argue, a bad one. With the pig’s heart Hirst has reinvented the symbol from a semantic, not a visual, viewpoint. He is a leader that way, not a follower of conventions.

Of the remaining three artists, Liu Fei’s painting of a carbine toting, shaven-headed female soldier is the most distinctive – it’s an image with personality (& similar to the one above). As for the show’s selection, it is actually more interconnected than what it at first appears, especially with the links between Tony Cragg and the two New Zealand artists. The Hirst is worth seeing because it is clever, not because of its price, so ignore all the media hoopla (Gow Langsford must be so upset!) pop in and have a look.