So cool you could burn youself

Matt Henry: Flatline
Starkwhite
7 September – 3 October 2009

Matt Henry’s two paintings in Starkwhite’s exhibiting annex out the back are ultra meticulously made and uber fastidiously installed. They tease us by oscillating back and forth in our minds between early modernist abstraction and consumer luxury items such as rectangular plasma screens and pristine oil heaters. There is an understated humour in the site with unnegotiable wall fittings like light switches and a fire alarm that get successfully incorporated anyhow - by being balanced with the paintings. All the placement (signage and artworks) is carefully considered. Nothing smack dab in the middle.

The black rectangle, hovering on a white canvas, is at eye height and draws you in like a screen – possibly just after the closing credits have finished (the end of art perhaps?). And conveniently near the fire alarm, a hot orange oblong you could almost warm your shins and knees against: great for powercuts on icy frosty mornings.

The Starkwhite room is smaller than the images above suggest, and the work more intimate than you might think, with its emphasis on commodity fetishism which it critiques but knowingly perpetuates. It is also very much about Henry’s manual skills at crafting immaculate surfaces and razor-sharp edges, and elegant positioning.

Henry is part of a school of RMIT (David Thomas influenced) conceptualist, neo-minimalist abstraction that we are seeing more and more of here in Aotearoa. He is exploring an interesting area that seems based on the display rooms of Harvey Normans. Images of perfect blindness and music of impeccable silence.

Double vision, double vision

Matt Henry: Doppelgänger
Starkwhite
16 April - 14 May 2009

This exhibition by New Plymouth artist Matt Henry teases out the confusing similarities between minimalist sculpture and elegant sound systems, or monochromatic minimalist painting (under glass) and flat plasma screens. These ambiguous geometric forms are presented in the two upstairs rooms that overlook K’ Rd, approximately mirroring of each other in their placement within the adjacent spaces.

These pristine box-or-slablike sculptures on the floor have a remarkable finish. They look sharply crisp, each edge or plane of their form looking almost hallucinatory in their hyper-reality. More perfect than perfect in their formality.

The leadless ‘sound systems’ are accompanied by a painting/sculpture hybrid where painted, glass covered canvas panels are float-mounted and framed. In one room the panel is a fluro lime green that has associations with outdoor TV sport broadcasts. In the other, the colouration of that panel is a very dark grey. You could confuse it with black caught in a raking light.

While they look vaguely like plasma screens, they are really thick and clunky in comparison. Closer to paintings that ridicule the presentational formats of ‘sensitive’ painting by being deliberately gross in their proportion and frame colour, they become bizarre fetish objects, items devoid of function that look store bought and not obviously ‘art’. They look impressively expensive.

Probably these works are best in a home where their ambiguity is most pronounced. At Starkwhite they are clearly ‘art’ and highly aesthetic. No one is likely to go looking for the missing remote control in the gallery space. In a house surrounded by other domestic accoutrements on the other hand, the box forms – not the wall components - would throw you. They are harder perhaps to worship as surrogate status symbols, and obviously mischievous.