Tony de Lautour's current show in Christchurch is visited by Andrew Paul Wood

Tony de Lautour: New Paintings: 2009-2010
Brooke-Gifford Gallery, Christchurch
March 2-27, 2020

In Tony de Lautour’s work over the last two decades, there has been a discernable distancing from the figurative ‘lion and kiwi’ and mountainous logo years. In the last ten years this leaning to abstraction has resolved itself in two distinct and oppositional ways; an all-over decorative surface and a more constructivist approach.

In Tony de Lautour: New Paintings 2009-2020, we see much of the latter. Frequently these are pop-cubist images reminiscent of the mid-period collaborations of Braque and Picasso, with familiar wood grain elements and a startling palette of Jeyes Fluid pink, pale lemon and eau-de-nil which is harmonised by the black backgrounds. Sometimes, as in Anna and Anita (the names of two friends) it is a stylised word that provides the composition. At other times there are references to the cubist collages of found items as in Spread, an overpainting of a real estate catalogue.

As if to give some context to these recent developments, the work Us v Them (named, true to de Lautour’s rock ‘n’ roll attitude, after a song by LCD Sound System) retains the black plane sprinkled with a grid of white dots like a cross between the Manhattan skyline at night and a Pac Man labyrinth. The symbols the artist once scattered through these grids have now become the dominant form. This is almost a revision and dissection of de Lautour’s past oeuvre, casting about the old lightning bolts, mashed potato alps and spiderwebs Killeen-wise, and mixing them up with Gordon Walters’ pitau forms and dribbling clouds that seem to recall Bill Hammond and John Pule. Of these latter forms, at the opening the artist mentioned to me that he thought that these had a resonance with Peter Robinson’s baroquely incontinent polystyrene sculptures.

In the painting Tower the symbols pile up in a tottering Tatlin-esque Tower of Babel (one is rather reminded of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird in which the souls of babies not yet born construct towers representing their future lives and vocations). The effect chimes with Pencil Case painter roots when one recalls the scaffolding/pigeon holes of Shane Cotton and the piled up portmanteaus of Seraphine Pick. It must also be remembered that de Lautour actually studied sculpture at Canterbury, which may explain something of this compositional trope.

The all-over surface works, on the other hand, are more organic in their exfoliation of disc shapes. In both cases this would seem to be closely related to Deleuze and Guattari’s phenomenon of the “body without organs” – an anonymous and non-differentiated surface – to which various “desiring-machines” and “paranoiac machines” attempt to attach in “counter-investment” (investissement). The plane/ground becomes a socius as a full body, forming a surface: “where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface” which is little more than a self-adjusting mirror to society, resulting in new syntheses.

What is really most evident in these new works is that de Lautour has (dare I say it?) entered the mature phase of his career. Most of the punk rocker vibe aesthetic that dominated his work throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was a kind of Magic Christian kind of trip – pose as something other than a nice, middle-class white boy to lure the bourgeoisie into a psychic maze and then relentlessly bombard them with surreal and endlessly new experiences until they come around to your way of thinking. De Lautour seems, apart from the occasional miniature tattoo lightning bolt or spiderweb, the odd song reference in a title, to have taken up the call of a purely aesthetic approach to composition. The maze is now formal, visual, compositional, rather than political or philosophical. The emphasis is off the pop cultural tics and bad white art/rebel without a cause, and even the monochrome alp/logo inspired critiques of art/land commoditisation have retreated into the background – though something of that remains in one painting in the exhibition of a dollar sign.

This new work is quieter, more thoughtful, subtler and less striving for the currency of effect. Perhaps it is true of all painters that eventually composition ultimately becomes nothing more than an excuse to apply paint to a surface. But yet, this is no simplistic and reductive descent into pure abstraction – the work remains resolutely and recognisably de Lautour (despite his occasional magpie cherry-picking of other artists’ leitmotifs) – and to me (and the audience, the connoisseurs, the market) that is what is truly important.

Images courtesy of the artist.

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.

The riff raff invade Te Tuhi

Tony de Lautour: B Sides and Demos
Te Tuhi
Toured by The Physics Room
12 December 2009 – 31 January 2010

This hang of Tony de Lautour’s works-on-paper show (unframed preparatory drawings for his paintings) is considerably different in feel from the version he had early last year at The Physics Room in Christchurch. That was denser and more compact, fitting many in a horizontal slot format - like a community noticeboard in a school corridor.

At Te Tuhi the presentation is not so claustrophobic. The walls are far apart and several rooms are used. Oodles of air. In one gallery only one wall is used.

The first room you enter is L-shaped with seven A4 sized works on paper, canvaspaper and cardboard, using paint, ink and glitter. They are evenly spread apart - each to be considered in isolation. On one nearby wall is just one image, a skull painted on a Workshop bag. The rest of the show has images butted together friezestyle.

The second gallery is round the corner through a door, and with the one wall. Ah but what a wall - for on it in a packed row are forty-five very small drawings / paintings, rendered in surprisingly fine detail on box lids, old envelopes, beer coasters, and canvaspaper. All sorts of portable surface are used to present a mixed assortment of de Lautour’s characteristic grimacing profiles and emblematic animals.

The third room is more immersive, and wittily set up so you stand in the centre of the space and gaze at three walls where the works’ bottom edges of each row are flush. This creates the impression of a nearby city with skyscrapers that surround you. You seem to be positioned in isolation within an unbuilt flat area – like that of Hagley Park in Christchurch.

These three walls vary. The left one with thirteen medium sized images features quick raggedy sketches on torn fashion magazine pages and folio paper, emphasising colour, pattern and abstraction. The middle has seventeen graphic portraits on unusual supports like Chinese newspapers, and the righthand frieze has eleven items on heavier black paper. The overall mood is feral, gritty and fast execution: very casual but unsettling too.

Nothing in this show is slick, which de Lautour paintings, particularly the large ones, can on occasion be. In fact that is the point of this show - its roughness. It has a take it or leave it indifference to prissification.

With the exhibition comes a very fine catalogue put out by The Physics Room containing a well researched essay by Mark Williams that I have already discussed. It looks at de Lautour’s and historical and sociological content.

De Lautour’s images here of course are more than just warm-ups for oil paintings. These cartoonlike mug shots have an independent life of their own, especially when seen in bulk. You don’t need to worry about not seeing the later ‘unscruffy’ versions because the early ones have an energy that perhaps disappears when re-rendered in another medium or scale.

Examining such portraits, most Maori visages included tend to radiate dignity and calm, whereas the more ubiquitous Pakeha countenances reflect their being what Charles Darwin referred to in his 1835 visit to the Bay of islands as ‘the very refuse of society’, later paraphrased as ‘white trash.’ Their faces look uncouth and brutal, and the setting of New Zealand / Aotearoa a harsh and hostile place to live, with not much tenderness or generosity to be found. Images that though often referring to stock mindsets of participants in this country’s history, seem focussed on the grim realities of the turbulent present as well.

Interpreting de Lautour

B-Sides & Demos: Tony de Lautour
Softcover catalogue published by The Physics Room
Essay by Mark Williams
50 pp and colour images
Choice of two hand stencilled covers by the artist
April 2009

Earlier this year in late February The Physics Room presented an exhibition of Tony de Lautour’s works on paper, with a few small canvases mixed in. What is interesting is that though he has made many much larger works in recent years (like the Logo and ‘mountain’ hangings and the recent more geometric paintings) that are tidier in style, more fastidiously tighter in finish, this exhibition concentrates on the looser, wilder, brusherly works, many of which are preparatory studies - drawings in paint and pencil.

The important thing about this publication is the superb essay by Mark Williams (an Associate Professor of English at Victoria University) that attempts to analyse de Lautour’s imagery. And whilst I think Williams’ account of the artist’s motifs is a bit reductive - de Lautour works by intuition and not with a consistently maintained sociological or historical logic – he is very clear, with lots of compelling evidence. I just think it is a little simplistic, that’s all.

Williams starts off thinking about Simon During’s discussion of Tony Fomison in the 1994 What shall we Tell Them catalogue that points out Fomison’s recording in the seventies of “the end of a social consensus fashioned in the struggle of the white working class and the progressive middle class to produce a controlled, communitarian society (p.5).” De Lautour, he points out, elaborates further on the white working class’s disillusionment with the counterculture, and its diminishing employment, its anger at its loss of economic security and its growing hostility in the eighties to Asian immigration. As Williams makes clear, in reflecting this de Lautour is a caricaturist who uses ‘slapstick humour’. He is not a Gothic Fomison.

Near the end of his text Williams opines that De Lautour’s “body of work is more honest than that of other Pakeha painters of an era which is now coming to an end as economics supplant culture and creativity.” He praises the “bafflement and anger of his cartoon kiwis and blank but active heads – the white world of those without education, taste, or expectations of financial improvement (p.11).”

I wonder if Williams is correct in seeing de Lautour as making indignant critiques of behalf of the white working class. Bob Dylan once called himself ‘a Song and Dance Man’, referring even to his songs of social protest, and whilst joking he was also serious and correct. He is primarily an entertainer.

The title of de Lautour’s exhibition here alludes to Nick Cave’s triple album box set B-Sides and Rarities, for like Dylan and Cave, de Lautour likes to entertain. His painting practice is often about being mischievous or provocative, works where he is ridiculing sentimental and overused symbols of national identity rather than expressing righteous anger. Of course as with most artists, a range of moods and interests becomes apparent in his images, and often preoccupations contradict.

For example, whilst he has made many paintings that refer to historical images of Maori, within his contemporary referenced works where all the personages are apparently white, Maori are naturally absent. Should that be obvious and assumed, something to be expected? He has often stated the ‘white’ content of his narratives in his titles but his images do not necessarily confirm that. It is possible he is being coy and that he is nervous about ridiculing both Maori and Pakeha.

Looking at his use of heraldic emblems - de Lautour’s Kiwis seem to represent the tangata whenua and Lions the colonial powers - or is that only a pre–Treaty scenario, with everybody becoming a Kiwi and a Lion (subject of the Crown) after 1840? How do we interpret images of Kiwis fighting with Lions, Lions scrapping amongst themselves and Kiwis likewise. Often both Kiwis and Lions indulge in identical behaviour, smashing bottles, shooting up, smoking and drinking, being vandals. Often both wear skull masks or Mickey Mouse ears.

And let’s say ethnicity is an issue. Looking at the other images of male heads in profile, are they always white, these bank tellers, mechanics and others? Can we really tell their genetic heritage by their profile, or lack of moko? Is it safe to assume that they are white, that ‘white’ is truly white, and that such a binary distinction is biologically believable anyway? Perhaps de Lautour is far closer in his attitudes to his ‘Maori’ friend Peter Robinson with his Blood Percentage paintings than we give him credit for?

Terms like ‘White’ or ‘Maori’ in de Lautour’s hands are ciphers or codes that seem to be open. They are like his Revisionist images of New Zealand painted on found landscapes - where maps of the two islands become lakes or chasms that can be filled like vessels. Unexpected meanings slide in. His use of images is not programmatic, despite his occasionally provocative titles.

If one was really determined to come up with another template – as opposed to Williams and maybe even de Lautour himself - if one did in fact insist on an alternative program, one possibility could be that of the criminal classes versus the police. The interest in weapons, prison tattoos, violence and vandalism, the thuggish nature of the thick-necked portraits: all allude to a New Zealand dominated by lawlessness (albeit comical in de Lautour’s hands), with both police and crims being indistinguishable apart from their heraldic components. Yet it is possible I myself am being what I have accused Wiliams of – overly reductive.

These are great issues to think about and this is a useful little book. With it, using Williams’ discussion and the accompanying coloured images, or alternatively perhaps this review with its links to many online gallery pages – you can mull over this artist’s rich array of distinctive paintings.

Recent Revisionists

Tony de Lautour: Prize-fighter
Ivan Anthony
4 March - 28 March 2009

This is an unusual dealer gallery show in that not all the work is for sale, and some of it is about six or so years old. Yet these ‘Revisionist Paintings’ are a section of de Lautour’s practice that some consider his ‘golden’ period: a time when he bought various amateur landscape paintings from ‘junk’ shops, works made by other, unknown artists, and modified them by superimposing his own imagery. He inserted into the given panoramas his own motifs that he had been developing in the years prior to this idea.

He had a show of them in Hamish McKay’s and I organised an exhibition at Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato while I was working there.So a few of those older paintings are combined here with newer ones, plus some recent ceramics. In fact a few of the slab ceramics are rendered on the recent paintings as tombstones.

In the earlier paintings of this type de Lautour often depicted kiwis as pot-bellied, drunken hooligans brawling and smashing bottles in remote scenic areas, where sometimes one could see lakes, mountain ranges or ditches shaped as maps of Aotearoa. The paradox with the vandalism is that it might be argued De Lautour is desecrating these acquired paintings through his additions. And that I am being two faced in even mentioning it – as if I am particularly highly principled. After all, I am praising the work. I think it is remarkable, and that the original ‘un-de-Lautoured’ canvases were probably dreadful in their unmutilated state. I’m arrogant enough (like the artist) to assume that is the case.

How does one interpret the scrapping protagonists in these works: the lions and the kiwis? What do these key motifs mean? The lions could represent the British Imperial forces and the kiwis, resisting Maori tribes. Or they might be referring to something wider, like cultural tensions within our art history. Could they be the traditional British tradition of art practice be warring with a new post-colonial or nationalist sensibility?

Be warned. De Lautour does have a mischievous sense of humour. Things are often rarely what they seem at first glance. Take a look at the recent painting shown above. It looks like grave robbers have been at work. The individual graves of the lion and kiwi are left untouched on either side, but in the centre, out of an empty excavated tomb is sprouting a huge tree. It is white, and ghostly, and happens to look unnervingly like a gum. Is de Lautour depicting the burial of a white-only consciousness (quite a plausible interpretation), or is he saying NZ art is turning into Australian art? (That is alarmingly cynical!) Perhaps it means something else again?

Wander up to Ivan Anthony’s and take a closer look.

Less folksy Lautour painting

Tony de Lautour
Brooke/Gifford
16 September - 11 October 2008

This de Lautour show is a mixed bag of paintings, ceramics and prints, but with the different image-making methods kept apart: woodblock prints on one wall, paintings on the others, ceramics in the director’s office.

The trouble is, it looks lifeless. It’s too similar to a lot of earlier Lautour shows in this gallery, and needs a rehang so the contrasting works resonate dynamically - instead of being kept apart in quarantine.

Over the past couple of years de Lautour’s paintings have been becoming more geometric, austere and planar, and less folksy. Moving away from Hammond and more cognisant of Gordon Walters or Don Driver for example. Cleaner, sharp edges, and more careful and nuanced in their composition – particularly in their placement of letters.

This period of transition seems to be taking him away from detailed recognisable imagery towards broader, simpler, more geometric forms. Abandoning narrative, but oddly, pursuing language - particularly the language of text messaging. A new playfulness with letter shapes is emerging.