Erratic (classically pomo) McLeod

Andrew McLeod
Ivan Anthony
24 February - 20 March 2010

Andrew McLeod is a regular exhibitor at Ivan Anthony and this show is typical – in its varied range of work types. There are large and small digital prints, also the ubiquitous small white stretchers with unravelling orthographic black box shapes, and then there are the big canvases. Plus various smaller painting experiments.

The prints show McLeod at his most inventive and eclectic – today Richard Killeen, tomorrow Peter Madden. The works that reference Durer and Fuseli are particularly rich in their layered complexity, as is another that contains amongst other things, darting squid-girls that glow like jellyfish zigzagging through an undersea murk. The quoting methodology succeeds in the prints but not the paintings because the prints manipulate the space with much more finesse. They make the paintings look oafish.

Painting is obviously not McLeod’s forte. The deliberately incestuous ultramarine and gold Auckland series are coarsely rendered and look like the digitally animated imagery of Cao Fei interpreted by Julian Hooper and Liz Maw. McLeod is not an artist methodically exploring the parameters of painting as a discipline; he is not interested in its materiality or organisation like say Simon Morris, James Cousins or Simon Ingram. There is one Abstract Triptych of black box shapes framed in three wide intricately inlaid frames that has a curiously memorable dynamic with its angular shapes, but few other successes.

Yet for all his faults, there is one work from this ‘non-painter’ that I find remarkable: a large painting called Pink and Green Abstraction with Dragon.

This last work has an intricate rendered surface of horizontal trellislike bars arranged like a wall of stacked up batons with angular ends that look based on Chinese architecture. In the middle of what from a distance seems to be a coloured wooden Venetian blind made by Gordon Walters - but which actually is far more complicated - is a pewterish/bronzy Chinese dragon that is like a jelly-mould. Below it (again in dead centre) is an enigmatic tropical pot plant: a peculiar symbol alluding to the dragon.

The delicate pale green and rosy light flickering through the slats is gorgeous. This is a radiant stunning work, which in the context of his other grosser efforts like the Auckland series, shows his activities with oil to be exasperatingly directionless. McLeod's practice seems so scattershot and unfocused.

So there we have it: the occasional inspired cracker of a painting, surrounded by unresolved experiments that I think should not leave his studio. Usually the best McLeods are the digital prints that pulse with intriguing pockets of spatial depth and resonate with the acuity of photographic – not painterly - detail. They draw your eye in so it doesn’t want to leave - such is their capture of your imagination.

McLeod matters

Andrew McLeod: Ocean
Ivan Anthony
1 April - 23 April 2009

We have here a varied range of oil paintings (and one digital print) from this Auckland artist - among them a few surprises. The very recent McLeod paintings are interesting in that they show a moving away from the playschool, Killeen influenced, ambience of earlier works, towards a more sensual, lush painting.In other words, they are less illustrative, being instead Romantic, elemental and other worldly. Very physical. They have a sweeping, immersive rawness, mostly without his 'normal' finicky, anal fastidiousness. They are very dramatic, particularly the images of the sea, and indicate a serious interest in the paintings of the German artist Arnold Böcklin (1827 -1901).

I find these images of McLeod’s intriguing. I warm to them more than his other paintings – this is surprising for I personally don’t like Böcklin’s work very much. I find it somewhat histrionic. McLeod’s images though have a gruntiness and comparative roughness which I enjoy. And the symbolic content doesn’t seem in earnest. McLeod here loves drama. It is the blatant theatricality and hammy humour he is going for (er, this is what I assume), and it works.

Placed in the same rooms though are the odd, very small geometric paintings he has been doing for some time – modernist works influenced by LeWitt, Vasarely, Albers and others. These experiments in reductive geometry and perspective are humorous too, because of their extravagantly ornate frames, not because of the geometry. Ostentatious and vulgar the incompatible borders are perversely placed around the dynamic geometry so that many viewers (like myself) grind their teeth. The format is maddeningly irritating, for the distracting frames set out to obliterate the carefully designed spatial contents of the internal canvases.

In that sense they are funny – if you get amusement from seeing an exemplary talent like McLeod mock his own compositional abilities. Yet this artist always has enjoyed excess and plentitude. Modernist restraint and understatement are not something he happens to empathise with. His ratbag hybridity – in his own terms (not mine) – makes a lot of sense.

(McLeod images above, except for bottom three from Bocklin.)

McLeod's digital prints

Andrew McLeod: Prints 2001-2008
Ivan Anthony
11 November – 6 December 2008

McLeod makes excellent digital prints that are wonderfully intricate and layered. To my mind, they are much more interesting than his less delicate paintings. Some of the dozen examples here do show elements used in his canvases, but mostly they feature floor plans and his interest in architectural space.

They tend to have a wit that the paintings deny – the latter seeming in contrast far too obvious. The prints have a deft, mercurial humour where contradictory elements swap over and interchange. Earth and the heavens mingle, anvils hover in the air, inside blends with out, domestic furniture ends up in the garden and cars get parked in the bedrooms where trees are also planted. Walls and semantic barriers have no meaning any longer. One of the prints is even set on a small canvas, as if to make that point.

The selection here is remarkably varied –in size and in image types. My favourite Cave Complex, is in the hallway, and quite hard to see. It has large silhouettes of lovers that form caves with their negative spaces. These are swum through by frogmen. Very clever and seductive, it is also otherworldly and magical. There is nothing dry or academic about it.

This is an entertaining exhibition. One of McLeod’s best.

No kiddie-winks

Andrew McLeod: New Works
Ivan Anthony, Auckland
27 February - 29 March 2008

This show of McLeod’s is a curious mixture of several large sumptuous oil paintings, a digital print, and little, black and white, orthogonal, perspective-preoccupied, linear paintings.

Killeen is omnipresent in McLeod’s practice but he has been for a long time now.

I like the digital prints. They are pretty entertaining with their imagistic juxtapositions, densely packed fine detail, and obligations I suspect to Guillermo Kuitica. Their attraction is that you can never get it all on first hit. There is always good stuff you miss.

McLeod’s luscious oil paintings seem so nursery based I find them irritating. Children under 12 should be banned from galleries and all artists (except me) medically ‘corrected’ so they cannot breed, and so be corrupted. I favour art that is about the seriousness and challenge of adult existence, not Rupert Bear type fantasies.

The small black-lined paintings are much better, but very odd in their thick ornate, gold frames. These highly eccentric works are strangely good because they are blatantly hermetic with their perspectival experimentation, referencing with Killeen, Sol LeWitt and Josef Albers. I like the fact they are about art and its own production.

McLeod is one of those artists who even if you loathe all he does, his work nevertheless is distinctive, and worth looking at. I like it even when it gets under my skin. The big paintings I find suffocating but those prints are peculiarly liberating.