Anthony shows Graham

Graham (a group show): Tony de Lautour, Rohan Wealleans, Michael Harrison; Yvonne Todd, David Cauchi, Richard Killeen
Ivan Anthony
3 February - 20 February 2010

This six-person group show at Ivan Anthony’s - a suite of mini-exhibitions by artists normally well known to Anthony visitors - is unusual in that it introduces to Aucklanders the work of Wellingtonian newcomer David Cauchi - many of whose wall drawings adorned the public toilet walls of the Adam Art Gallery during Wall Works last September.

Cauchi’s occasionally mock-Mayan graffiti looks best directly on architectural planar surfaces and not on pinned up pieces of white paper but the latter ink drawings are easier to sell and indicate a witty, albeit cynical (realistic?) sensibility. Of the 37 works, my two favourites are: 'The World' with its two percentage bar graphs of ‘good shit’ and ‘bad shit’: and 'The Critic' with one hand on his erect member and the other gouging out his eyeballs with a dagger – the pleasures and dangers (power and self-hatred) of what Martin Jay calls the ‘scopic regime’ of the modernist gaze.

Killeen’s three digital ‘paintings’ around the corner in the hall, though also graphic, are highly patterned and spatial, and less immediate. Surface here is illusionistically sculpted by ink-jet programming and is densely ornamental. In contrast, a line of sixteen raw Tony de Lautour drawings in the office - on scrap paper and card - are very similar to his recent Te Tuhi show and like Cauchi, also satirical, but less about the art world and more about New Zealand history and white working class frustrations.

While de Lautour likes to render brutal, swaggering oafs with coarse scruffy brush marks that hint of incipient violence, Harrison focuses on delicately rendered, ethereal young women in thin acrylic washes that dwell in another more imagined and longed for world of floating forms. De Lautour bruises and shoulder-charges the viewer into entering his imaginary space while Harrison caresses and coaxes.

Rohan Wealleans’ wall work Horrogami is a simplified version of another work of the same name in the Chartwell collection – but without collaged photographic elements this time. It features yellow and orange spiky cut-paper and glued-on slices of blue marbled paint so that the projecting folded image looks part vulva, part sea anemone, part jeweled but prickly bush – in a curved glass case.

Yvonne Todd’s The Menthol Series (1999) is in five identically sized parts, with a cat with peculiarly rounded ears in its centre. Like with Harrison’s images there is a haunting and restrained gravitas, except that Todd uses an approximate symmetry. Her work’s outer extremes have gentle diagonals (manicured hand holding a white die and chain necklace versus a lily-shaped glass vase toppled over a hardened pool of spilt candle wax); those second in have four verticals (white carnations versus white recently snuffed candles); and the sleepy feline in the middle eyes us with amused suspicion.

While much of this show has been displayed before (like all of Todd and some of Harrison) it is still good to revisit. Cauchi though is a refreshingly surprising component. Hopefully his contributions to the Auckland art scene will be now more frequent.

On Adam's walls

Wall Works
Curated by Christina Barton
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
8 September – 4 October 2009

The notion of drawing or painting directly onto the gallery wall has been with us for at least forty years now, probably becoming most well known with the practice of Sol Lewitt. For this method, Tina Barton has picked an unusual group of artists to work on the Adam Art Gallery walls, eight individuals some of which you and I would be unlikely to predict: David Cauchi, Michael Harrison, Patrick Lundberg, Julia Morison, Simon Morris, Reuben Paterson, Kim Pieters, and Jeena Shin.

For the first half of the show the gallery was opened so that the visiting public could observe the artists constructing their artworks. If you click on the link here you can examine nineteen slides showing samples of the processes involved. (Put your cursor on one image and lefthand click halfway down the righthand edge to change it).

Barton has come up with a terrifically inventive eight-unit combination. The big surprises are Cauchi to install graffiti in the two toilets, Paterson to screen a DVD loop in the dark walled, rubber-floored ‘dungeon’, and Harrison to paint on a large moveable wall by the entrance. Inspired choices.

David Cauchi’s contribution is a revelation – far funnier and classier than what you’d pick up from his blogsite. His use of the orange and green planar surfaces of the Ladies and Gents on which to place withering (often appropriated) comments on idealism, art world participants, liberal democracy and our meaningless lives in general make him a sort of Aztec-obsessed Keith Haring–meets-Emil Cioran, and are so entertaining (though he’s serious in his unrelenting scorn of anything and everything, not trying to get laughs) that his incessant but earnest quips could turn you into a compulsive dunny loiterer.

Reuben Paterson’s black and white film on a pearlescent glittery screen celebrates a queer politic in its furtive, bunkerlike space and bombarding central-state imagery. The flashing, pulsing sequences of kaleidoscopic patterns expand and contract, spin and tilt; hurling you through the screen at unexpected speeds - via different jarring scales - to explore delicate geometric snowflakes and dotty asymmetrical Brownian motion. It is difficult to leave the space because you keep discovering new shapes and tumbling axial alignments you had never previously noticed.

The tunnelling physicality of Paterson’s project has similarities with Kim Pieters’ towering and shimmering wall paintings of cascading pale blue and creamy dribbles on the staircase. These gorgeous surfaces evoke the Sublime and force your eye to rush to the ceiling and its corners, seeking out strategically positioned, negatively-shaped drip-free zones that allow planar respite.

Similarly vertical linear qualities, but much finer and graphic – not overtly painted - are also apparent in Julia Morison’s multi-panelled Myriorama mural that descends down the wall under the Adam’s infamous Athfield-designed floor/ceiling slot. Her columns of 106 portable and reusable panels, each with a gently mottled background overlayed with one of thirty-two repeatable permutations of entangled or parallel lines, drop down or traverse three linked walls, and play off against two thick black parallel bands that bisect the high planes.

Simon Morris and Jeena Shin use only one wall each. With Morris’ looping grid of pale yellow ochre lines you can see where the tone and saturation levels vary, and how – using templates not pencil – the artist has gradually built up the horizontal structure. You can also see how in the first half he has added extra lines, doubling back in reverse to create a denser complexity. The occasional ball within the transparent trajectories indicates where the tips of adjacent lines have overlapped, providing clues to where certain sections of pathway have shared common routes.

Jeena Shin’s large mural features tumbling tangram-like forms of overlapping rectangles and triangles in glossy grey on a matt white plane. The occasional fine ridge shows traces of her process as she modifies the angular geometric rhythms and descending negative gaps. The evanescent forms are getting larger for this artist, becoming more robust, more strident and less delicate.

Michael Harrison’s work on a movable rectangular wall is a comparatively simple composition that shows a small red cat suspended within the larger negative silhouette of an open-mouthed Alsatian where the curved arabesqued contours of the feline tail and canine jaws play off amusingly against each other. It is fascinating to see Harrison deal with this uncharacteristic scale and successfully resolve any formal or technical problems.

Patrick Lundberg’s project involves thinking about the site specific peculiarities of the wall fittings and architectural fittings around the top of the stairs, using a repertoire of generic pencil lines (repeatable with tracing paper) similar to those used by Sol Lewitt. You have to look closely to see them and how Lundberg refers to various wall edges, ceiling planes, bookcase corners, light fittings and banisters.

This show looks excellent now, but I saw it last weekend at the time of the Adam’s Tenth Anniversary Party. For that event Barton had commissioned temporary structures designed and built by second year students of Victoria University’s School of Architecture and Design to be placed inside or next to the installations by the eight artists I’ve just discussed. The result was a political, aesthetic and conceptual disaster, making many of the artists furious that their projects were interfered with at a time when many out-of–town visitors had come to see the show. It was sad to see such curatorial blundering - though thankfully, only short-term.

Joys of diluted acrylic

Harrison paintings
Michael Harrison: Sun Square Saturn
Ivan Anthony
30 July - 22 August 2009

Harrison’s nine works here are characteristically small and intimate, yet varied in tonal mood. Most are works on paper, using diluted acrylic with a little pencil, though there is one work on canvas. There is not so much positive/negative interaction of form this time around.

The darker works on paper have more presence, exuding nuances of moodiness and greater spatial depth. The Devil Reversed is the exhibition’s peak, composed a little like a movie or video poster, with the male and female stars in the background and a very odd leaf-nosed bat head hovering in the middle of the foreground. This could also be mistaken for the foreshortened head of an old bearded Chinese gentleman.

Probably Harrison likes to tease his audience, so they speculate on how such an image might be connected to the main protagonists that inhabit his devised ‘theatre’. Another tonally dark work shows reflecting puddles of rain or possibly jissom, with another (much randier) couple in a clinch in the background, and a man's head below. The work is dodgy but also intensely beautiful in its surrealist ambience.

Not all the paintings on paper work. A blue naked girl with long hair hanging down over her face looks rigid and awkward. Another, with a cuddling couple shown twice in silhouette - above as a contoured roof of a sort of hollow mosque, and inside it - has hovering sky-borne birds on one side and a hill of trees on the other; but the latter's triangle of foliage and trunks seem too regularly positioned and dull.

The real surprise in this show is the single canvas work of a couple of horses, with one delicately rendered as if it could be part of a fresco. This larger animal has a rippled, slightly combed or caressed quality to its grey flank, an intricate texture that is quite different from Harrison’s more usual liquid acrylic application.

It will be interesting to see if this artist explores this tighter, more opaque form of imagery further. His work seems to be moving towards a different sort of surface, a new sort of tactility.

Sensitivities

Feelings (a group show)
Ivan Anthony
23 May - 1 July 2009

Ten Ivan Anthony artists here present sixteen works for our thoughtful deliberations - in the ‘office’ part of the gallery to the left of the top of the stairs. While some of the items have been exhibited before there is enough new work here to make this show an exciting display to spend some serious time with.

In Anthony’s office, a tiny Matt Hunt matchbox-sized painting faces two recent, considerably larger, Richard Killeen ink-jet works on the opposite wall. Killeen’s printed objects and creatures are so dense in illusory space and patterned planar surfaces that looking at them is like using a knife to cut one of those super rich Italian cakes jammed with nuts and fruit. It requires considerable ability to optically navigate around all the detail embedded in the wildlife floating before us. The air is thick with suspended fauna and intricate playthings, so much so that the composition seems holistic, without a dominant structure behind the placement of elements.

One surprise is a Roger Mortimer painting showing a plane flying low over (or within) a sea which doubles as topographical map. It is like a varnished over transfer, with a delicate, brown, brittle quality, and similar to a child’s encyclopaedia illustration with lots of unexpected detail. There are also incongruous additions – like the plane’s shadow turning into a bending hammerhead shark, or an underwater pheasant.

The title of this show is apt. It points to the visceral side effects of emotions, almost a pre-linguistic state where sensations from images and the relationships between them acquire their own power. A small Michael Harrison acrylic on paper carries the subtlest, yet most effective of punches: a delicate stalk of bamboo leaves hovering above four rocks in a pool, its downward spikey tips foils to their heavy undulating curves.

There is a sense of piercing stillness in the Harrison that mentally moves, yet the Saskia Leek in the adjacent room, of a rocklike cubist formation, is also riveting. In odd contrast to the static Harrison, Leek’s superbly constructed image seems a fragmented mound at full gallop - a sprinting tanklike animal.

Dior, the Yvonne Todd portrait, shows an immaculately tailored and impeccably made up young woman with long tousled and unruly hair. That aspect is slightly unnerving - something uncanny and disorienting - a detail that dominates the image so that (unusual for a fetish substance) its tangledness takes on an independence. It seems disembodied, with emotional properties that lash out against ‘correct’ grooming. Hair that is 'angry'.

Brendan Wilkinson’s mauve watercolour of death taunting a beautiful young woman intrigues with an inventive synthesis of fragmented skull parts, cobweb, necklace and tassels. Its drama is a cleverly placed foil to the superbly drawn Francis Upritchard dancing girl (a hand coloured lithograph) in the hallway, an image like the Harrison mentioned earlier that is calming and serene. Her languid arms and meticulous hands have an ancient Egyptian profile that offsets a peculiar but haunting impassive gaze, and implied but invisible coloured veil.

UNITEC show

Kirstin Carlin, Michael Harrison: Destination
Snowwhite, Unitec School of Design
20 October - 14 November 2008

In the two narrow rooms of Snowwhite gallery are eight Michael Harrison acrylic-on-paper works, and six oil paintings by Kirstin Carlin; alternating in small groups. They are an odd couple, Harrison and Carlin, brought together by Snowwhite’s curator Mary-Louise Browne: his delicately precise edges and gently mottled surfaces acting as a foil for her ragged contours and under-painted, broadly-brushed streaks.

Harrison is the more accomplished artist by far, judging his intimate scale carefully in relation to the carefully aligned, meticulously positioned shapes that he constructs with considerable finesse. With Carlin, the small vistas she creates are often crammed, having no tension with the edges of their modest stretchers. Her symmetrical landscapes are underworked with their thin sweeping strokes, though one asymmetrical image of woods around a lake is better because of its isolated, vibrant squiggles for trees. Of her selection, her paintings of castles work best due to her weaving together of perpendicularly opposed brush strokes. They have a sense of controlled construction that her blander landscapes lack.

Where symmetry fails for Carlin it succeeds for Harrison. Because brushstrokes are not his subject-matter, he can pull his audience in close and not need to make largish works. He concentrates on perfecting nuances of shape so that birds in the sky become logos - like out of a Batman movie – as if positioned in front of the moon.
Harrison creates psychological drama in the tradition of the Siennese painter Sassetta, with divine signs in the sky, but using a modernist simplicity.

Visually simple, mentally complex

Michael Harrison: Example of the Ravens
Ivan Anthony
16 July - 9 August 2008

Some artists are never totally committed to a completion of a work, even if the item in question has been signed or exhibited. Even if a collector has purchased it and installed it in their home, they still might call round and just add (or remove) a little something. The work is never far from their thoughts, especially if it is owned by a friend or somebody who lives close by.

The artist once known as Merylyn Tweedie used to be famous for occasionally changing collages that collector friends owned. And in this show at Ivan Anthony’s are several Michael Harrison paintings that have been shown in earlier stages years ago, but now are different. He obviously hasn’t wanted to let go. To forget them and walk away.

There are nine acrylic works on paper in Example of the Ravens, all looking unnervingly like watercolour but not. I used to only prefer the Harrison works that focussed on positive/negative shape relationships – a carry-over from my deep affection for Gordon Walters paintings - but now I’ve changed. I’ve grown fond of his other stuff too.

Harrison’s images exude incredible sensitivity, by virtue of their ultra-delicate washes of very thin colour, faint pencil lines and precise placement of symbolic images. That can be a drawback. Like Reichsmarschall Gōring who once said "Whenever I hear the word ‘Culture’ I want to reach for my revolver,” one can sometimes bristle at too much sensitivity. It can be cloying, and make you long for something raucous and deliciously vulgar. A fistful of salt chucked into the bowl of sugar.

These works are incredibly romantic in the way they depict women. As images of besotted adoration they intrigue because of a sense of worship that seems Victorian. Yet Harrison (thank God) is more complicated than that. Hints of sarcasm and mistrust creep in.

Enlist shows a man saluting his overbearing, controlling lover, trying to figure out how to break free. Prediction has another fellow contemplating the dynamics of his relationship, represented by an embracing couple in the sky. They are enclosed in a silhouette that could be a woman’s head with long hair and flouncing curls. It also could be a skull and crossbones. Crows and a leopard-faced gargoyle hover ominously nearby.

Such images of healthy cynicism keep Harrison’s work fresh and not soppy like it might at first seem. His use of soft greys and mottled blues bring a discreetly moody atmosphere to his practice. Images on your computer screen won’t capture it though. You need to see these works directly in the gallery to enjoy their intimate scale and painted surface.