Superb paintings

Johl Dwyer & Schaeffer Lemalu: Milk waterfall
A Centre for Art
16 March - 3 April 2010

Here we have five paintings by two very different artists in a somewhat small space. Two textured and gestural panels are by Dwyer, one of which is much much bigger than all the others. Lemalu’s works on the other hand are ‘minimal’, and all about delicate and faintly detectable colour fields.

Lemalu’s three small ‘white’ canvases emphasise concentrated perception, and are subtle indeed. So much so that the degree of soft natural light through the Wellesley St window in the afternoon seems to be crucial to grasping the processes behind their production, as does where you stand to one side. He has applied gouache to their surfaces and later washed it off. In fact he has soaked it in water, scrubbed it off and then restretched the canvas. Sometimes he has put a more paint on its surface a second time, and left it.

His colour is so understated that you wonder if it is an afterimage you are looking at. Some floating yellow blur, a hint of a chromatic smudge that comes perhaps from you looking at something dark or saturated. A couple of the gallery walls are a wooden ochre brown, and that affects your perception of the two works’ overall rectangular surface. They seem tonally at odds with the work on a white wall.

Dwyer’s paintings are extremely different from Lemalu’s in their wild tactility and traces of dramatic hand movement. They incorporate glued-on rectangles of painted canvas or plastic vinyl, and lots of scraped on modeling paste that has left ripped horizontal ‘gashes’ as you might often see in a Gerhard Richter painting. The work is very physically layered, with tiny dark Christopher Woolish squiggles, sweeps of sprayed colour and intricate David Reed smears. One work is quite sculptural, with thick zigzagging lines of solid blue paint squeezed straight out of the tube.

These two artists make a great combination because the juxtaposition of such opposite methodologies is so refreshing. This dynamic creates an exceptionally exciting painting show, and probably the best show I’ve seen at ACFA. It may be one of the best ever local painting shows in Auckland as well.

Language matters

Send
Two Rooms
11 September - 10 October 2009

Six artists from Australia and New Zealand present a varied language-fixated show in the large downstairs Two Rooms space, demonstrating a wide range of approaches and materials for text manipulation.

Anne Noble’s photograph of her daughter’s Ruby’s imaginative spell for attaining invisible flight are a big surprise and a good laugh: a recipe that could almost come out of Macbeth, carefully written out in pencil in a school notebook. The work looks a little like a Marie Shannon, but less sweet and longer, written on several open pages. As a document it seems authentically private as a genuine fantasy, not constructed to be documented.

The two white neon works from Mary-Louise Browne are gorgeous looking with their snappily elegant letter shapes, and clever references to Alexander Pope (just nine short words make up one long line) or popular parlance (three short words), but their self referentiality makes them cling to the media of Kosuth and the syntactical structures of Weiner. Browne’s method of technical presentation here is unwisely derivative, the sixties conceptualist art historical connotations blocking off access to her genuinely witty content.Perhaps she should have left the original Pope quote (and ten low words oft creep in one dull line) intact?

Rose Nolan’s wall paintings (like those recently seen at Te Tuhi) are a lot better than her two free-hanging Hessian banners shown here, dense with oval perforations through which you apply the language. Their mangy reverse sides make you wish they were on a wall, and the declared sentiments of Less Is More or (the opposite) Less Is Over Rated are hardly earth-shattering - despite the humour of the 'subtracting' holes. Nolan is not in form with these clumsy red and white hangings that double as conceptual filters.

Nolan is Australian, as is Mikala Dwyer who presents a long, blue, river-like carpet that spills down the wall and across the floor. It features phrases in coloured felt letters naming parts of the moon, features discovered by Giovanni Batista Riccoli in the seventeenth century. This list has a poetical flavour not necessarily accentuated by the rolled-out carpet format. Dwyer is famous for her formidable powers of invention with ‘non-art’ materials but here her contribution seems decidedly ordinary.

The exhibition’s highlights are three drawings by English artist Fiona Banner, framed drawings of (or studies for) larger wall texts. They come from Banner intially describing the actions of a stripper she hired so she could verbally describe her. Earlier she had also treated a sexually explicit movie as a source for ‘life model’ descriptions. Her studio writing - made in live peformances - is in short staccato-like phrases, bursts of disconnected factually described body parts, strung out in a ribbon of pencilled language. A bit like Robbe-Grillet in its clinical precision.

One Banner drawing has the written planes make up a corner, the others are frontal spatially - one like a tall heap (an allusion to Smithson?), the other a low rectangle laid over another painted over, much fainter, written oblong. The text is printed, not cursive, and quite scratchy and raw.

Denis O’Connor presents a series of slate Chinese inkwells bearing relief-carved images based on literary texts that he loves. These small paperback-sized, framed annotations are visual footnotes that for him are quite small, and simpler than usual. The intimacy works, drawing you in close, plus there is an added sensual bonus of muted, wax-coated colour which has an extraordinary softness.

Banner and O’Connor are worlds apart, but they (and Noble) make this group exhibition a good visit.

Not good

Johl Dwyer and Fatigue
ACFA
27 May - 13 June 2009

What can one make of this? A show of indifferently displayed, dull, wacko, trippy-dippy stoner art – but whoa!...maybe that is too harsh. Cruel and irresponsible even? Yet to be clinical, Dwyer’s (I think unfortunate) exhibition seems too incohesive to be anything other than bi-polar. However I am assuming they are not from such a cognitively disadvantaged person. That being in ACFA there is some sort of strategic reason behind their disarray.

Out of forty odd collages on unframed bits of cardboard, made of torn wrapping paper, pencil and ink drawings, and daubs from experiments with smeared paint, maybe six or seven are worth looking at, and most of those are placed inaccessibly high near the ceiling or down by the skirting board.

The work seems to come from a pharmaceutically imbibing practice, which with talented people might remotely lead eventually to some positive outcomes. You can’t analyse the process as you would with an innovative artist like Dan Arps and look for patterns. These ‘spaced–out’ collages are tired cliché. A stack of sixties Zap comics would be less shambolic, and considerably more informative.

Fatigue’s videos are a little better – if you can see them at all in the glaring daylight, and are entertained by images of people walking down the street in three second bursts, repeated six times.

I usually have huge respect for ACFA projects but here I’m baffled. They’ve lost the plot.