By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

What is this cruel quirk that sees so many artists only given proper recognition after their deaths? Despite a number of public gallery shows over his career, it is only since his death six years ago that New Plymouth artist Tom Kreisler has truly moved from outsider to the centre of attention. That attention has come with a touring survey exhibition from Govett Brewster Gallery, currently at Adam Art Gallery curated by his son, critic and curator Aaron Kreisler. By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

What is this cruel quirk that sees so many artists only given proper recognition after their deaths? Despite a number of public gallery shows over his career, it is only since his death six years ago that New Plymouth artist Tom Kreisler has truly moved from outsider to the centre of attention. That attention has come with a touring survey exhibition from Govett Brewster Gallery, currently at Adam Art Gallery curated by his son, critic and curator Aaron Kreisler.Cruel it may be, but time has been good to Tom Kreisler's work. Spanning several decades, the work here feels utterly fresh. It feels at home with contemporary artists who, like Kreisler, are interested in art as part of everyday life, rich and open in its meaning - poking a stick at the idea that art might be a search for weighty absolutes and truths. It is art that instead projects ideas with the lightness and transmutability of thought bubbles, playing with possibilities with cheap found materials. Many are bound to delight in Kreisler's doodles on the invitation for a Sarjeant Gallery exhibition here entitled Who Am I? Belief and Identity in Art. Kreisler adds unidentifiable squiggles, the signature of Klimt and the words "extinct bird looking for his origins."

Death provides the opportunity to sweep up the ashes, so to speak, and death is often present in dance with life in Tom Kriesler's work. There's an impish black humour reminiscent of some Mexican day of the Dead festivity. In Kriesler's A Brush With Death a grinning skeleton appears to do a jig, holding a broom aloft like a torch, and a knife close to the bones.

In these dances the artist puns furiously, squeezing incongruity out of what everyday life presents him with. In the juxtaposition of text and image there is a refreshing lightness of conceptual touch. The world around is something to be unwoven and played with; ideas are to be teased out of the things around you. With his play Kriesler shows little care for artists who reach for a profundity far beyond themselves; there's far too much to be milked in the commonplace. "Death smiles in the living room," he states in one work. In another, "He didn't change his life, he changed his pants."

Tom Kriesler's work encourages us to enjoy the openness of interpretation. "Don't jump to conclusions," he scrawls. Harking back to Marcel Duchamp, he provides smart works that tease us with the complexity of their ideas yet the lightness and wit of their readymade execution. Aaron Kreisler's curation does great justice to this in not imposing boxes, thematic or chronological around the work. Instead he allows ideas to hop around the walls and the threads to be woven between works by the viewer.

One of the exhibition's great strengths is the attention paid to small work and the source material for bigger works within vitrines. This sees the artist's process and more ephemeral material given equal weight with canvases - in keeping with the way the artist weighs different material equally throughout his work.

While the vitrines are full of newspaper scraps and notebooks, in the big canvases it is common for the background to be crudely lined mimicing the pages of a notebook, while the imagery leaps around with the quicksilver dexterity of the work of a cartoonist. It's akin to the magician pulling the unexpected from a hat - as exemplified in Kriesler's gleeful yet ghoulish depiction of black and red winged creatures entitled Rebirthed Bat.

There are art references galore, and the ghost of McCahon the signwriter is everywhere. Yet while McCahon used speech bubbles, numbers and handwriting to elevate the things around us and make declamations of truth, Kriesler's work breaks the reverence of absolutes down. He employs these devices instead to open up the dance of possibilities to be found in unraveling patterns.

The Adam Art Gallery emphasises Kriesler's contemporary relevance by neatly pairing Kriesler's paintings, drawings and ephemera with the whimsy of recent graduate Sam Morrison's kinetic installation with found materials. Whiff Whaff cascades, tinkles and gently blows through the gallery's architecture. As example, a fan powers a pink plastic propellor on dowling, shaking a piece of cheap jewellery chain, which in turn rattles against a grating attached to a shoe. Think Don Driver and Len Lye collaborating in a late night Taranaki garage spree.

Opposites Attract, Tom Kriesler and Sam Morrison, Adam Art Gallery, until 20 April

Image: A brush with death, acrylic on board, 2001, 820 x 770 mm, Tom Kreisler Estate Collection.

27/02/08