Portraits of Hotere

Martin Ball: Carey’s Bay
John Leech
28 April - 22 May 2009

These portraits of Ralph Hotere from 2000 are a mystery. Why would anybody want to make one - let alone eight? They tell us so little. Hotere’s head and face don’t provide the right sort of visual stimulus that an artist like Ball needs to make a grippingly successful image, like he has done with say John Hood.

This exhibition showcases Hotere as subject-matter. One could debate the nature of (what I think is ) his grossly inflated reputation, how his best painting came out of the period between the early seventies and mid eighties, and how his vast output of mediocre works on paper tarnished a once dazzling aura – but that would be churlish. He is a much loved figure because of his personal generosity and well known hospitality, but hardly worthy of the sycophantic flattery that this very dull, sentimental show exudes.

And even if you disagreed entirely with all of the above, would you really buy a Ball portrait instead of a Hotere original - if the latter were affordable? And as of course, for most they are not, is there some process of osmosis going on here, some infusion into Ball’s reputation, by virtue of touching the hem of St. Ralph’s garment? A little of the old contagious magic can work wonders for the market. Is that the real reason for this very peculiar display? The cult of the artistic personality, an array of eight ‘sensitive’ physiognomies, here makes very sound commercial sense.

Light on skin and fabric

Richard McWhannell: Introducing Cowboy, Girls, Girls, Girls
John Leech
17 March – 26 April 2009

In the world of painters, even globally, there are very few living portraitists of any substance. Of those who use identifiable sitters, one could name Lucien Freud; of subjects unidentifiable, Marlene Dumas; of those creating fabricated extrapolations, Jim Nutt.

This show at John Leech of twenty McWhannell works shows how difficult it is to create something memorable. Only one really stands out and that is a parody, a clever send up of Balthus’s Cathy Dressing, with the artist exposed in full glory with open bathrobe, cowboy boots, and hat. It has the same compositional awkwardness as the original, but the young woman whom McWhannell replaces with himself, is a pale sallow mediaeval beauty, flat and cardboardish, not a living solid person of the real world.

Balthus is interesting because his compositions surprise you. His organisation of shape, and his psychological peculiarities, hold your interest. However with McWhannell’s six self portraits and thirteen images of young women, the body language and poses are so conventional they could be based on photographs in any magazine. They don’t have the amusing toy-like quality that Hockney, say, achieved with his famous portrait of his parents, nor is there interest in the lyrical possibility of colour. Chromatic control is certainly present but nothing sweet or fruity. The palette is body or skin-based. Even the furniture and walls reflect aspects of skin.

McWhannell’s real interest here is the falling of light on flesh and fabric, and how he can orchestrate pools of glowing lumination. The trouble is that some of the poses are so tediously dull their banality distracts - it takes you away from this interest. The long legged sitters are so demurely ‘feminine’ that their ordinariness, and the conventional frontal placement of the sofa, repels you.

The best works of these ‘girls’ are when the artist concentrates on their faces, shoulders and chest. When they look beefy and ‘unglamorous’ – that’s when he arrives at something interesting, or when they seem to be day-dreaming, are totally indifferent to his presence, or are clearly irritable.

McWhannell’s self portraits with cowboy hats could be about the male insecurities of hair loss. In other self portraits that feature different shirts and jackets, and a repeated compositional template, the pleasures of theatricality become his subject matter, the delights of narcissistic reflection mixed with manual dexterity that can display itself.

Oddly there is a harsh acuity and rigidity in McWhannell’s work now that makes his earlier, softer, more scumbled paintings look so much better. They had a relaxed and blurry playfulness that led to unanticipated, dreamlike narratives. Perhaps that was a Fomison influence and he is now deliberately trying to move away from those qualities. These latest works – despite his quirky wardrobe – have a crushing lack of whimsy. McWhannell has formidable powers of observation which may be why he now likes the light to be so severe. Yet the content is so bourgeois: he has forgotten how to invent.

Neo-appropriation

Neo-appropriation
Sofia Tekela-Smith: Grace
John Leech Gallery
11 November - 5 December 2008

Sofia Tekela-Smith is an artist whose practice showcases the tension between ‘applied’ art and ‘fine’, and attempts to bridge, if not obliterate’ the distinction. Making jewellery is her first love and she openly flaunts it, using various strategies to legitimise its status as ‘sculpture.’

With her earlier work, placing her body ornaments onto black fibreglass busts modelled on herself, family and friends, she used a quite brilliant device to critique the colonial gaze, whilst making (traditional) sculpture that could also display ‘Pacific’ jewellery. Since then though, her strategies have been less successful. Other devices, such as making large colour photographs of Polynesian (and Pakeha) women with red stained hands miming poetical phrases, have ended up perpetuating the sexually appraising gaze they claim to be critiquing. The current show at John Leech’s has other problems.

One of these is the use of appropriated images from the Renaissance (Botticelli and Raphael), a method linked to the eighties and in Australia anyway, to artists like Imants Tillers and Julie Brown-Rrap. Tekela-Smith was a teenager when those artists were making such work and her thinking is different: she has tied the Renaissance images and her own body into a narrative about the life of her mother who was a nun before she married Sofia’s father.

It’s a clever idea but it runs out of steam when she uses a tondo format for framing (decorative motifs imposed on to mirrored surfaces), into which she places her pendants and necklaces – in front of the photograph. The mixing of illusory space and real objects seems forced. The codes of representation also get mixed in an unresolved manner: background with indexical photography, foreground stitched lines which sometimes also run through the photos.

These sewn lines serve as a sort of clumsy drawing. Sometimes she uses silk thread, other times her own hair. Even though they are symbolic and are used to make a political point about women’s craft, they lack finesse and end up looking awkward.

Sofia Tekela-Smith’s jewellery looks better in isolation, away from these measures that try and get it acceptance as ‘art’ – or if that already, then ‘serious’ art. The convoluted framing and narrative contextualising only distract from ornaments that look far better by themselves.

Scratch 'n Sniff

Summer Show
John Leech, Auckland
12 December 2007 - 2 February 2008

It is always worthwhile having a good nose around in places that deal a lot in secondary sales like John Leech - or the various auction houses that have pre-auction exhibitions to draw in potential bidders. You often discover early work by artists you like that has not been shown in major municipal institutions or the artist’s local dealer gallery. Sometimes you find examples that are unusual, that differ in some way from their accepted style, or are hybrid images between styles.

There are lots of works here I really like: the wild brusherly Mrkusich; the cool, lacquered black-blues of Hotere; the bizarre McWhannell car; the early folk-arty Stevenson.(see above)

But two works in this show I’m really wild about. They utterly intrigue me.

First of all there is this little Terry Stringer. He is an artist I don’t generally admire, for I find his bronze mock-cubist/deco figures and faces a bit stuffy and formuliac. However his image of a hand plucking the head off a small figure really surprised me. It is mesmerising in the intensity of its violence: like something from Goya. It is very funny, witty and terrifying on several levels. The vanity of the body language of the headless figure is very entertaining. It looks like a soccer player about to kick off - to begin a match in a crowded stadium – but the ball under his left foot could also be a head, another one perhaps. And the proportions of the armless figure look very contemporary. With his short legs and long torso the scene looks comical, with the body slightly twisted as if posing for a photograph.


The other work is a McCahon painting of a Northland landscape. To me it is quite suggestive. It seems very sexual and not about landscape at all. The lower half seems to be a woman’s crotch with her pubis and thighs. Above them hovers the head of a penis and a cloud of spurted ejaculate.

Okay I do wonder if my twisted imagination here is playing tricks on me. Maybe I’m just oversexed and need a cold shower. But maybe also an artist like McCahon could create images he didn’t fully understand himself.

On the other hand, maybe he did? We can’t assume he had no sense of humour or mischievous perversity. It is very likely he was interested in the primal, and that he viewed carnal desires as a legitimate layering he could mix with landscape forms and the eroticism of rounded geological formations. I think it was intended. Dirty Colin. How wonderful.