Lost in Always at the Ivan Anthony Gallery

A declaration of interest. A year or three ago I entered a gallery above Karangahape Rd and saw a work which hit me in the stomach.

It was a green formica tabletop, on which a map of the world had been formed out of dust, as if miraculously formed in the grime of an abandoned factory's lunchroom.

Not all the world - New Zealand was missing, not part of this place.

My first thought was that it had been years since I had such a gut reaction to a piece of art.

The second was to trust my gut and buy the work, by Brendon Wilkinson.

Wilkinson has another show on at Ivan Anthony Gallery above K'Rd. While many of his previous shows have had sculptural elements - landscapes inside tin cans, scenes painted on beer bottles, dystopic dioramas, architects' models of houses from hell - Lost in Always is all paintings.

"I haven't given up making models, I just want to become a better painter," says Wilkinson, sitting in his studio in a Grey Lynn garage cluttered with unfinished canvases and small sculptures, books by J.G. Ballard and Jonathan Swift, newspaper clippings of prison riots and the tsunami aftermath, pages torn from magazines, boxes from military and train model kits, a poster of dunes in the Far North eroded like some Martian landscape, a spray can of Selley's Space Invader expanding filler which has been squeezed without shaking to allow the contents to ooze out into a golden blobby pile.

"Painting is like a window into something other, another place ... inner space," he says.

The words come slowly, short sentences and long pauses while Wilkinson stares out of the door at the morning glory overgrowing the garden. The lighter clicks nervously as he tries to keep a thin Park Drive Mild rollie alight.

He avoided a request for a picture session, pointing the photographer instead to the paintings in the gallery.

"There's a picture of the guy up a tree, that looks like me," he says.

Only a little. The boy in Blood and Honey is perched on a blasted stump, feeding off honey which droops from a limb like a Dali clock. A dog looks on from below.

"It's a sexual work - the honey, the knife, blood," says Wilkinson, without elaborating.

On the easel is an unfinished painting similar to works in the show, tree limbs which end in square sections like processed lumber, with crystalline leaves and flowers sprouting off. A cicada casing is attached to the painted bark. Animal, mineral or vegetable? "All three."

Wilkinson grew up in Masterton, making models of trains and planes as a kid. "I just never grew up," he says.

Instead he came to Auckland University's Elam art school, graduating seven years ago. "Art school is really just an expensive way to meet people," he says. "I think it would be better to give people a textbook on how to draw and leave them to it."

He was picked up by the gallery from Elam along with Andrew McLeod, Yvonne Todd and Roger Mortimer, and is also represented by Peter McLeavey in Wellington.

He is also participating in public gallery shows, including the title piece in the Highchair exhibition at Auckland University of Technology's new gallery in St Paul St, which is the local counterpart to the city art gallery's Mixed-Up Childhood show.

In the back room of the Ivan Anthony Gallery is Internal Surface, six small paintings hung in a cluster. A rocket firing in a test bed. A car engine block. A ghostly white figure leaning over a dark suited figure lying in a bath.

Wilkinson describes it as a memorial to the space age. "That is an ongoing theme I only tackle in groups like that."

His approach draws on the cut-ups of William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin.

"It's meant to be abstract. You could put a linear storyline to it but that's not exactly what I'm after.

"It's like my version of a short story. Guys like Burroughs, that's their technique."

Wilkinson says British writer J.G. Ballard is a huge influence.

"His work is not about character, it is about the psychology of a space. For me, surrealism and science fiction are the only interesting things to come out of the 20th century, in terms of art. There is still a lot to go there."

Ballard has talked about the need to create new myths to interpret the world rather than continue with "Chaldean barnyard fables" like the Zodiac. Wilkinson concurs.

"The new myths are all about endings, whereas the old ones are more like beginnings."

Exhibition

*Who: Lost in Always, Brendon Wilkinson
*Where: Ivan Anthony Gallery, 312 K'Rd, to Mar 26