Watercolours from Cologne

Michael Jäger: Auckland haendisch
Muka, 68b Ponsonby Rd
7 April - 26 May 2009

Michael Jäger is a Cologne–based artist who likes to work with painted fragments: delicately textured, sensitively drawn squiggles or strokes of grainy watercolour that are stacked up against a vertical edge of each small sheet of paper. They fall towards the centre of the page like shredded salad and other fillings in a sloppily made burger.

He piles up marks like they had spilled off a rubbish cart, scraps discovered on the road and thrown up on a heap that is sliced in half by the edge of the page. Like Baudelaire’s rag picker; but with abandoned flourishes, wipes and scruffy scumbles instead of old clothes. They are not quotations he’s using, but they almost could be. They are categories of coloured, scratchy mark - surrounded by lots of white paper at the middle and top of the page.

Jäger is a particularly interesting painter. In the past he was worked on the back of sheets of glass and arranged his marks of thin paint in floating clumps. I like the awkwardness of these page paintings (painted drawings, perhaps, is more accurate). Their lopsidedness gives them a Gustonesque vulnerability. They are not too sweet, they have a raw earthy colouration, and their wonky tottering quality is not contrived. There seems to be an underpinning principle at work, the way they enter through the side edges of the paper sheet.

One discussion around these images is that it is as if one of his older, bigger paintings has exploded, scattering its pieces far and wide, and the artist has collected them up and popped them into jar or shelf-like pages. However the marks themselves are delectable items of contemplation; not damaged or mangled in any way. They relate perfectly to each other as horizontally layered compositional elements.

At Muka he has also made four architectural lithographs where the loose thin marks are woven into planes of solid opaque colour that have geometric gaps for them to peek through. They are vaguely like coloured bushes wildly bursting through a quickly assembled dwelling, and are displayed horizontally and flat on a seat to perpetuate the 'explosive' sense of the watercolours own irregular placement on the walls.

Jäger is a little like Judy Millar in that he is fascinated by the relationship between painting and architecture, and likes to repaint gallery walls so he can rehang and recontextualise his images. Last month he did this at RMIT in Melbourne with David Harley in a U-shaped space. In Muka though he has worked on one wall only, drawing with third inch lines of tape and using pots of tonally and chromatically clashing colours he has never found in Germany.

The page of watercolour painting he positioned against this complicated backdrop was unusual in that its painted ‘stack’ of marks was really two stacks butted together in juxtaposition. It seemed to comment on the opaque brown, pink, orange and blue horizontal planes delineated on the wall, and a tumbling configuration of wiggly spaghetti-like white lines that referred to fluffy edges.

I’m not sure about the harsh severity of the paint and tape wall painting – but the soft gently speckled marks of the streaky watercolour works take your breath away. It’s a terrific exhibition.

0003 comments on

the Pivi project

Tumbling but static tangram grays

Jeena Shin: Fractus
Te Tuhi
7 March - 19 July 2009

This wall painting of Jeena Shin’s is carefully rendered in five closely related tones of grey. Almost a monotone it is never bland.In fact it is highly energized, with light raking across raised edges that have been deliberately caused by brushing paint towards (and not away from) now absent, meticulously positioned, masking tape.

The 'colours' are Kodak greys and the wall looks as if it could be a photograph. At first glance you think the configurations are regular, as if a template from a pattern, but it is soon clear that is not the case. Each one is uniquely tilted, and the spaces between them all differ.

A small mural like this insists that the viewer look closely at its clusters of spikey shard-like formations - so they can grasp the uniqueness of each section of angular-shaped wall surface, its shifting tonal variations that still appear static.

That it is not a painting on a stretcher elicits a different response than from a support with a thickness. The fine ridges provide a drama separate from the precisely mixed tonal control. We see two parallel systems of manipulating light, one fixed once the acrylic on the wall is dry, the other evanescent, beholden to sculptural relief considerations, and dependent on the weather and the hour.

(Working study above.)

If it is

Fiona Amundsen and Tim Corballis: Si C’est
Te Tuhi Billboard Project
8 March – 19 July 2009

Three hoardings on the street on a wall opposite the front entrance to Te Tuhi. Two are large photographs by Fiona Amundsen of the part of the Auckland waterfront once called the 'Tank Farm’. The one of the far right is a text by Tim Corballis, a couple of fictitious transcribed conversations set in the future (next month) – about listeners not attending to – or grasping - what they are being told. There has been an accident in a nearby boat and they are oblivious.

Amundsen’s images look very different this size, a large 12 x 15 foot rectangle for each. They are unusual for her. Slightly painterly the colours are especially seductive, as if they were oil paint – particularly in the reflective water of the harbour. The weave of the plastic fabric brings a glowing but delicately gridded light into the colour and not onto it. Secondary and tertiary hues play off against the strident primaries.

For Amundsen the chroma is strikingly sensual. There is a generosity with this scale and its impact on colour not found within her earlier work in galleries or publications. The middle image is crystal clear and utterly gorgeous, while the one on the left has a deliciously fuzzy boat bobbing around blurrily in the water. A real celebration.

Embracing mortality

Heather Straka: The Sleeping Room
Hocken Library Gallery, Dunedin
4 April - 26 May 2009

Heather Straka was last year’s Frances Hodgkins Fellow down at the University of Otago, and so this is her presentation of the years work. Some of it has already been shown in Auckland, particularly the ‘body parts’ paintings based on autopsies and dissections. There were some simmering erotic portraits of young women in that smaller Anna Bibby show, but they were in the minority.

However in this current Dunedin show of about twenty-five works, those portraits dominate the walls and space - despite the blackly humorous exhibition title referring to death. The ghoulish anatomical images are in little groups of three or four, and are much smaller.

The androgynous women that Straka focuses on have a hint of the demonic, a sneering menace that switches occasionally to a slightly hammy gothic. These girl-boys glower with an almost imperceptible whisper of humour. Mixed into their theatrical intensity is a vaguely smirking knowingness, a celebration of their own seductive sexual powers - the pleasure of taunting and teasing.

Here Straka explores a carefully thought out vocabulary of body language, mixed with nuances of facial expression and architectural props. Half a face and body, baring an exposed flattened nipple, peers around the edge of a corner. In another, a contorted twisting back, with straining face turning to the viewer over her compressed shoulder – in a tiled bathroom. A third has tightly bound breasts that instead of concealing femininity, accentuate it through the transparency of the bandage. It is all double (even triple or quadruple) talk. Lesbian erotica, with the ambiguous gender also designed to make straight and gay men (and straight women) horny.

While it is two shows in one, perhaps there is a unity present after all. Male ejaculation is traditionally called a ‘little death’, prostitutes in England used to rent rooms overlooking sites of public execution (allegedly to increase the client’s pleasure, having coitus while watching a hanging), and sex and death – through women often dying in childbirth – have long been traditionally linked.

Or maybe a rumination on not only mortality but the transience of life, and with that, the transience of desire - the quickness of pleasure. How quickly lust and/or love fades. Half the show displays certain semiotic buttons or triggers that arouse or pique interest. The other half declares the stupidity of desire, and the dumbness of life itself – in the face of death.

Straka’s grey tonality suits these themes. Even such sexy come ons have skin patinas glazed with the stony hues of mortality. All chroma is carefully knocked back. As with corpses devoid of body-heat, all temperatures are icy. There is a wicked aura of necrophilia in the portraits, despite the women’s lively eyes and flickering half-smiles.

I like these works of Straka more than her other earlier paintings. The faces contain some qualities of self-portraiture, not literally as physiognomies, but as rebuses for aspects of her personality. There is an element of self knowledge here, perhaps some wisdom about mental games and sex. An intriguing exhibition.

More fishy tails from

artandmylife and Cheryl Bernstein

Confusia has some thoughts on

Collage as sculpture.