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.

Rubber-craniumed rascal

Rohan Wealleans: Rogue
Ivan Anthony
4 July - 25 July 2009


Rohan Wealleans is one of those artists whose best work inhabits the space between sculpture and painting, and between narrative and abstraction. He gets into trouble with freestanding sculpture or easy narratives using animal life, tribal figures or women’s orifices. The great work comes out of ambiguity; stuff that is vague, nebulous, sculptural and wall based.

This current Wealleans’ exhibition shows once more how technically and formally innovative this artist can be – reinventing sculpture; reimagining painting.

Once it was the intricate marbling revealed when rubbery layers of stratified paint applied over bits of furniture were sliced into, peeled back, exposed and pinned down. Then it was carved into angular formations of latexy acrylic, crystalline prismatic growths on a geological paint surface. Now he has blended the two: angular prismatic offcuts are embedded in deep veins of rubberfied paint to be re-exposed when like the large ball in this show, the form is bisected and pulled apart.

Other things are happening as well, especially with the works on paper – a material out of which he has made great finned/open-book page formations in the past, wildly trippy versions of mid-career Don Peebles with none of the puritanical (though still compelling) austerity.

The works on paper in this show are of two types. One is of large, pale glued on pipi-shaped slices, each one ringed with concentrically diminishing fine-lined contours. The other is of butted together clusters of encrusted coloured pimples, hundreds of little pointed knobs that seem to be the start of small stalagmites - all glued to the paper.

The paintings also are of two types. One is of bits of encrusted or carved paint (or stratified strips) glued on to heavy denim so they look a bit like those plaster walls (or concrete floors) with pieces of smashed china or tiles embedded in them, or Schnabel plate paintings. They look folk-arty, as Wealleans’ work sometimes does, like something you’d find at a church fair. They have an amateurish crafty look about them, as if made by an eccentric aunt to be forgotten and later discovered in a dusty attic. They also look like Licorice Allsorts shoved into the rich icing of a cake.

Wealleans’ other painting type seems a sly joke about John Reynolds and his use of small canvases en masse in Clouds to create an installation. Wealleans’ Silver Lining version has six hundred small stretchers, each one a mini-painting of glued-on chunks of solid acrylic. They are very varied and the work seems not to necessarily need a ‘shaped hang’ like a Tony Cragg coloured plastic ‘painting’ – as shown here. All six hundred acrylic assemblages in a long row at eye height could just as easily hold your attention. Maybe more.

As I indicated earlier, my favourite Wealleans are the more sculptural ‘paintings’ (or painted ‘sculptures’) that really project out from the wall. I like their lumpy pachyderms with strange warty gall-like or testicular growths. This current work, like that of the past few years, is fiddlier. Nevertheless this is an excellent, high-energy, characteristically inventive Wealleans exhibition. Not to be missed.

Eating out

Rohan Wealleans: Mains
Ivan Anthony
18 June -12 July 2008

Rohan Wealleans is having a pretty successful year. He is currently finishing his Titirangi residency and is about to open ‘A Moveable Feast’ at Lopdell House. He then goes to New York City for a Wallace fellowship in a studio. In the meantime he has this show at Ivan Anthony’s.

There are four sorts of work here, apart from a film screening in one room that seems to be exploring the myth and ritual of James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’, and made on a Dunedin beach.

There are the large canvas ‘Tantric’ paintings, featuring naked (faceless) goddess figures, sitting like Buddhas while receiving oral sex, that are made using a palette reminiscent of Philip Trusttum. There are ‘blowfish’ sculptures that appear to be fitted with shark jaws and seem to be a reference to vagina dentata and male fears of castration. There are also deck chairs on wire legs that support ‘sittable’ paintings, and most successful of all, there are comic covers with sprouting planets or warty carbuncles that seem to be exploding through the paper.

With Wealleans the more sculptural and abstract the better – in my view. I’m not keen on his figurative images or his loose canvas paintings, because his bad drawing, use of Hanlyesque silhouettes and contrived tribal narratives upset me. In contrast I much prefer his earlier but more ambiguous layers of peeled back paint placed over doors or drawers, and his later hanging testicular forms.

He is a clever manipulator of cut out ‘gems’ of thick stratified paint though, expert at making negative-diamond pock marks and gluing down the removed pieces so they look like they’ve just burst through the painted skin like an outbreak of bejewelled measles. Wealleans has invented an unusual visual sculptural language with the substance of paint where his skill with a blade plays a vital role in his distinctive ‘brand.’

The works he exhibited as part of last year’s Telecom Prospect showed what a sophisticated artist he can be. This show of ‘Mains’ is a bit formulaic, as if he has used a template for the composition of the paintings, but as a rule Wealleans never sits still. He probably over does the laddish infatuation with pudenda but such images help offset the Puritanism that was once a major component of this country’s art. It will be interesting to see how time in the Big Apple impacts on his images and methodology.