For Dominion Post, September 3 2004

Painting is Dead, Long Live Painting

By Mark Amery

Not so many years ago some critics were assigning painting to the art historical dustbin. The medium had, apparently, quite literally painted itself into a corner - becoming increasingly irrelevant following a final late 20th century series of self-referential, abstract endgame manoeuvres.
 For Dominion Post, September 3 2004

Painting is Dead, Long Live Painting

By Mark Amery

Not so many years ago some critics were assigning painting to the art historical dustbin. The medium had, apparently, quite literally painted itself into a corner - becoming increasingly irrelevant following a final late 20th century series of self-referential, abstract endgame manoeuvres.
 The finest painters have never stopped proving otherwise. Besides, here in New Zealand we've also been following our own distinctive trajectory. Late modernist bloomers dealing with our own rich contemporary cultural issues, New Zealand artists have taken painting to some strong new places in the last few decades.
 It's also often as soon as something gets proclaimed dead that artists feel the freedom to give it life. Here as elsewhere, postmodernism, photography, installation and digital media have all re-energised painting. They've helped find new ways for painting to engage with the world's very fabric.
 
In her current exhibition at Bartley Nees Gallery (until September 11) painter Sara Hughes allows mutant escapees from paisley patterns to spread like viral infection across the walls. Based on work she undertook in research into paisley as 2003 Frances Hodgkins Fellow in Dunedin, the textile pattern has been energetically experimented with digitally to provide the selection pool for this set of dynamic organisms. Captured racing off across the wall as if in reaction to tiny self-induced explosions, they are left splayed and splatted like squashed mozzies on the windscreen. Challenging the physical world with the virtual, like trompe l'oeil they also suggest three-dimensional space.
 
While her work at the Dunedin Art Gallery, and the pixellated dots swarming over surfaces of the City Gallery entrance hall during Prospect 2004 were printed onto vinyl, here Hughes has been encouraged to paint onto aluminium (like stickers, the vinyl deteriorates when unstuck). This new progression might suit commercial ends, but it also gives her work a great new tactile edge. The clear, crude mark of the hand in the colouring-in reminds me of phone doodles, at odds with what you expect from a distance - machine-produced variations on a well-worn theme. It's not just virtual space and real space, not to mention abstraction and science, in conversation here, its craft and art, at both the domestic and industrial levels, as well.
 
Hughes engagement with science and technology allign her with fellow contemporary painters Monique Jansen and Esther Leigh. Together with older artists like Judy Millar (also with Bartley Nees) these painters make a persuasive case for abstraction's recharged contemporary relevance.
 
Meanwhile, on television, it's as if all the prophecies of the death of painting came true - Petra Bagust and Sally Ridge encouraging you to slap up your own minimalist works for your apartment. Like Sara Hughes, Simon Morris (also showing at Bartley Nees) subverts these DIY formulae. His paintings may appear on cursory glance a straightforward made-to-fit formalist play with abstraction, but just as you're getting comfortable with the work's flat directness, its cool intelligence starts playing tricks on you.

Morris has been among the most searching and rigorous painters in New Zealand in his extension of abstraction past its supposed endgame. Unlike the worlds created within the modernist frame, the work doesn't operate by, or for, itself. It instead turns conceptually outwards, relying on the world and people around it to activate it. Responding to architectural space, Morris' wallworks are often based on following a set of instructions. Sending a single clean stroke of paint off on one continuous geometric journey across the walls of a gallery, its twists or turns are often predetermined by chance, and always by the confines of the space. This is art as a tool for exploring the world around it, referencing urban patterns and testing out the potential of the spaces it is asked to inhabit.

Hughes' work also leads rather naturally to a showing of Robert McLeod's latest batch of paintings, on show from Monday (until 2 October) at Bowen Galleries. McLeod has for several decades blazed a singular bold trail as a colourist and abstractionist - and seemingly often appearing to fall outside curatorial attention as a result. A survey at Pataka last year paid overdue respect.

In recent years McLeod's painting has taken an even more engaging form, morphing out of abstraction with typical McLeod muscularity into complex explosions on the wall of a cartoon-like figuration. You sense for McLeod too that contemporary developments in contemporary art haren't killed painting, but, rather, have left the possibilities for the medium wide open again.