Peter Madden, Coming from all the places you have never been.
Peter Madden, Coming from all the places you have never been.
Scalpel rather than paintbrush is the tool used to create distinct collages
In art today there are many roads. Three artists this week chose different yet uncrowded pathways.
A substantial retrospective of the work of Peter Madden is on at the Gus Fisher Gallery. He began on the road of collage, making images on a flat surface. Some of this collage work is in the smaller gallery, along with a side path he took preserving flies and painting them in bright stripes in bold flag colours and in gold. An extraordinary swarm of 60 or more gathers on the wall.
His works from the main path he has followed fill the foyer and main gallery. There is nothing like them in New Zealand art. He has made a career of cutting images from coloured illustrations, often from National Geographic magazine but also from many other sources and combining them in compositions of the utmost intricacy. He uses a scalpel rather than a paintbrush.
The pieces cut range from just a few millimetres to 100cm, with a few much larger images. Often hundreds of these images are crowded into one work in dense clusters.
The cluster effect is extraordinary. The viewer searches for a theme among the complex crowds because each spectacular piece has its own unity but there is no story or message. The unity may lie only in related colours in the work. Yet they are instantly recognisable as by Peter Madden and he only. He has created a world of his own.
These intense images are often circular with the images diminishing into the centre or expanding in size to the edges. Voids are part of the composition in some works, notably in three big pieces in the foyer. One has a huge space in the centre, the other two have space beyond a horizon. The space is emphasised by tiny but prominent figures on the horizon. One is a tumble of forms called Post Disaster and the other called Dispersal has a diminishing, falling effect.
The work often becomes sculptural. Instead of being framed, the tiny cutouts are mounted on stalks like growth. These works stand alone and spring from a variety of bases: antlers, shoes, hats and skulls presented on chairs, which are part of the imaginative, freestanding piece.
When these are matched by heads notable for a multiplicity of eyes, the total effect is of a singular, stylish exhibition, one done with elements of the macabre to add a special piquancy.
A painter who has always been outside the regular art circles, following an undeviating path, is Rozi Demant whose latest exhibition is at the Warwick Henderson Gallery at its new Newmarket location.
Rozi Demant, Shrouded.
She began her career as a prodigy with a sell-out show in her late teens. Her subjects have always been portraits of beautiful young women and surreal, dream landscapes occupied by curious figures she has made her own. These are naked women figures with impossibly long, insect-like legs linked with landscape, flowers and ornate cages for singing birds. Humming birds and large dragonflies flit through many paintings.
The paintings are made with outstanding technical assurance and shades of golden and rosy colours which she has made specially her own and her work is instantly recognisable.
In this exhibition it falls into the two categories. The portraits are in oval frames which recall Victorian painting. Some, particularly the ones associated with flowers, are simply appealingly sweet but there are several that deepen the water.
These are paintings where the eyes are downcast and the head is bound by intricately painted chains of gold. In one case, Shrouded, the chains bind right across the eyes. What is suggested is that beauty can be a troubling gift surrounded by fluttering transient things.
This theme continues in the surreal works such as Swathed in Chains where two of her typical dream figures cocoon a third in golden chains while preparing a cage for her. The theme is also explicit in Cages and Chains where, in a thunderous landscape with a mountain on the horizon, a tall figure is surrounded by elaborate birdcages. The ambiguity and dangers of beauty are clear and it is these ambiguities which give the work its compelling quality.
Another artist who found his own way and also lit a path for others to follow was Theo Schoon, who was Indonesian born and schooled in art in the Netherlands. When he came to New Zealand he recognised the design possibilities in modern Maori art as well as ancient rock drawings. He identified design possibilities which would become an integral part of artistic expression here.
Among other things he was an excellent photographer. Professor Michael Dunn accumulated a collection of his photographic work taken in the 1940s and has chosen a selection which is on show at Kinder House. Schoon took memorable photographs of thermal activity in Rotorua.
His work is notable for images taken immediately above mud pools where he is close to the action. Mud pools and encrustations emerge as striking patterns and create a new way of seeing volcanic activity and integrating it in art.
Where and when: Warwick Henderson Gallery, Level 1, 255 Broadway, Newmarket, to May 30 TJ says: Amid echoes of Victorian images of beauty and strange elongated fairy figures there are surreal examples of the chains that bind beauty in brooding landscape settings
What: Photographs by Theo Schoon from the collection of Michael Dunn Where and when: Kinder House, 2 Ayr St, Parnell (parking behind the house) to June 7 TJ says: Theo Schoon, who died in 1985, was trained in the Netherlands but was quick to see the possibilities for New Zealand design in Maori art and, as these excellent photographs show, Rotorua's volcanic activity.
