Good start

Selina Foote: FIRE RIOT MEAT
Newcall
13 January - 31 January 2009

Selina Foote had a striking little exhibition in ACFA in August last year, and I was expecting more of the same – lead on a little by the invite blurb which described how she altered found online images. Actually this show is quite different. Her practice has radically changed. It is now closer in thinking, oddly enough, to the Newby / Moore installation now on at Window.

Foote’s earlier paintings were more graphic tonally - with more ‘realistically’ saturated chroma too - but now she is knocking that back with milky or mauve washes. The work was more surreal and as such disturbing. Now it has a cooler, more icy, cerebral quality – as if examining representation but not chasing ‘affect’. There is a new distance apparent in these eight works, with a chalky quality as seen from through a diaphanous screen. The show's title seems to allude to Mary Louise Browne's use of magic squares and transmuting words.

I miss the creepiness of Foote's earlier mutilated images. These new ones are a pinch bland with their bleached hues, but not all of them. The method of placing the pale layer varies from work to work. Some just flatten out the space – as with Racing Cars, Singer and Diorama – and deaden the underlying photo-based images. In others the layer looks like a rippling curtain and repeats the orientation of the form (as in Cactus), or is in brusherly streaks (as in Fire).

The best ones are when the washes are not consistent in density but uneven and splotchy. Some areas are opaque and reveal nothing underneath, others are transparent and provide you with clues. This teasing effect can be amusing, as shown with Meat (as selection of salamis and hams that could occasionally be cheeses) and Riot (you can just detect the flailing arms and punching fists). Horse is also buried under a puddle of purple but the image is so static and banal nothing gets generated. It stays forgettable though it is perhaps a little more maudlin.

It is good Foote presents these paintings as a coherent group, because if you saw them individually (in isolation) you might think she had had temper tantrums and impulsively thrown a jarful of paint at each canvas. That she has had some sort of crisis and suffered a failure of nerve.

If one wanted to interpret these paintings (if that were necessary - it may not be, but it is fun to try) how would one go about it? In a very interesting little essay which discusses the process of pressing flowers within the pages of a book, John Ward Knox mentions the faint coloured indexical traces left by the crushed petals and leaves on the paper. Though her images are found online Foote’s might allude to memory and how some aspects fade and others are vividly retained.

The works might also be a critique of realism itself – and also photography - as a putative method of correlated semblance. The obliterating white screen might hold the position held by Nelson Goodman, Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss and others (contrary to Peirce) that all signs or codes of representation are arbitrary. Perhaps Foote agrees and feels a deep dissatisfaction with her method.

Anyway, hats off to Newcall for kicking off a new year of Art in Auckland. This is a stimulating beginning. The city is particularly empty and dull this time of year, so it’s great to see energetic and fresh gallery projects now happening.

Hide and seek

I close my eyes and count to ten
Selina Foote
A Centre For Art, Achilles House
30 July – 17 August 2007

Selina Foote’s paintings at first take appear to be interested in kitsch or sentimental subject matter, a distant cousin of say the paintings of Robin Neate or Saskia Leek. That impression is mistaken for the work really is about the processes of obscuring and revealing, covering and exposing. The depicted subject matter itself is not that crucial.

Foote’s painterly, not over-finished images are characterised by a soft palette where the chroma has a greyish tinge. Saturation is skilfully muted and kept under control. No intense colouration leaps out at you.

Harriet Wild, in a natty little essay positioned on the wall of the corridor outside the ACFA entrance, talks about Foote’s five small canvases as demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between realism and abstraction. However symbiosis is a partnership between equals and in Foote’s work, realism dominates. The oblique geometrical components seem tangential to something else.

One painting shows a demonstration at a karate tournament where one competitor with a high kick smashes a solid panel held by two men. The bottom sixth of the image is obscured by a semi-opaque triangle blocking out details of the scene. Another of a Christmas tree has two large triangles covering portions of the image on both sides. One other work, a portrait, is partially covered by flat, pale, mauve twigs sprouting all over its lower and peripheral facial features.

Two others, Monster and Santa, use attrition. They feature a sanding off some of the pigment surface, a picking away of selected encrustations of paint, or hiding large areas of the body or face behind dry-brushed, dappled leaves or mottled sandy textures. These ‘subtractive’ works are not abstract but surreal and suggestive. And disturbingly nightmarish. Creepy little paintings that initially seem sweet but which hint at deformity. A bit like very early Francus Bacon they are far superior to the ones with overlaid geometry, and show Foote to be a skilled image maker. Someone to watch.