What he saw with his eye off the ball

By MALCOLM BURGESS

What with prohibitive pricing and the winds of fate, most of us will experience the fifth World Cup at a distance. Although televised, it just won't be authentic, and will lack that certain something only being there can offer.

Thankfully, the Rugby paintings of the late, great Roy Dalgarno are on show at the same time to add depth and colour to this test of our national mettle. The sport is without doubt better off for having had an artist acquainted with Picasso and Francis Bacon probe its drama and dynamics.

Although Dalgarno was no fan of the game, the empty streets of Parnell during the 1987 World Cup were enough to drive the Australian figurative painter to depict our national obsession in a series of works that wring the essence out of the game's iconic moments.

Roy Dalgarno sounds more like a name from the world of soccer than a star in the rugby heavens. Indeed, as outsiders to the sport come, Dalgarno had the credentials. He did not like sport, according to his widow, Anna. "He just wasn't that kind of man," she explains, quite matter-of-factly.

When he finally turned his brush to the subject, it was not from the grandstand, amid the roar of the crowd, but mediated through the television set, painted from the paused frames of the first World Cup on video.

That Dalgarno could take so much away from watching the game on the small screen should offer solace to those bitter that the IRB snatched the cup all to themselves. Who would think such vibrant paintings were studies of the drama frozen in one 24th of a second?

This exhibition at Ferner Galleries' city gallery was timed to coincide with the World Cup. Although they are more than a decade old, completed in 1991, the strong images really do contribute to the experience of watching the live games on TV. They linger in the background, ready to leap out at you stronger than any edited highlight.

Forget the ball for a second and watch the players in the slow-motion replays. You're seeing the game in a way that might have approached that of Dalgarno. Awesome human forms in the throes of hard yakka - working and playing as hard as they are able, doing their bit for a group that's bigger than the sum of its parts. How different is such a scene from any socialist realist subject matter?

Dalgarno was a man of contradictions in other ways, too. He liked the good things in life - caviar and champagne - and yet was a great supporter of unions and the lot of the working man.

Although he rarely deviated from depicting such fare, he never held a job as such, laughs Anna, apart from running an ad agency in India.

He was a member of the Australian Communist Party but lost his taste for politics after settling in New Zealand. He would talk philosophy with taxi drivers and had a voracious appetite for Clint Eastwood movies.

Born in Australia in 1910, he studied in Paris at Atelier 17 and attended the Pratt Graphic Centre in New York before settling in Auckland in 1975. While he fraternised with great names, weaving in and out of the 20th century's great art cliques, Anna believes that his wandering life - he could not sit still for more than 10 minutes - was part of the reason he didn't achieve the fame of some of his contemporaries.

Art historian Bernard Smith puts it in part down to the way realism went out of vogue during the Cold War years in favour of abstract expressionism. We tend to consign socialist realism to the annals of East German and Russian art and aren't so familiar when it is as close to home as Australia. That this was his chosen form is not surprising.

Dalgarno, who died aged 90 in February 2001, felt at home with the left and the labour movement, especially the maritime and mining unions. After the war he was commissioned to draw industrial life for unions and corporations alike.

Dalgarno's Rugby paintings take cheeky liberties, but are always delightfully playful and fond of their subjects. Sometimes his faces are crude, moustached approximations, and sometimes fine characters, etched with concentration.

You don't have to look hard to see his politics shining through, but then why separate out a man's beliefs from what he produces? The face of the central player in Drop On It is unquestionably born of the same brush strokes and colour as the blurry audience in the background. Is he meant to be interchangeable, dispensable, or does it indicate he is made of the stuff as those who enjoy it from the stands?

In another work, Untitled, the flesh-tones, garbled faces and the way the running players merge into one stroboscopic array of limbs evokes Bacon, who was an acquaintance during Dalgarno's varied life.

Dalgarno doesn't keep his eye on the ball so much as depict its wake. Long after the oval has moved on he shows the individual players and their relationships.

In The Ball Game, for example, the ball is almost out of the field of view, ripped from the scrum, which is shown as a fragile but mutually supportive structure formed of interlocked arms and legs.

On pause, it turns out, you can see things that the human eye has no time for in play.

Humorous touches abound. In The Ruck there's a flash of striped underwear, and for some reason the ball, though visible, lies neglected beneath the fracas.

Jumping at Four is all about heaviness made light - the effortless throw of the ball, the adulating open arms beneath, all of this up high in the clouds, little separating it from a great, religious painting. But what were socialist realist works if not secular liturgies?

Why did it attract the interest of such a unionist and left-winger? Perhaps because, in New Zealand, the sport was traditionally about the ordinary man, as opposed to its aristocratic associations further afield.

With the World Cup playing in the background, Dalgarno's Rugby paintings are like viewing the sun through welding glass or its image on a piece of paper. They do not diminish the original but help us to understand something that's hard to really experience unless you are a part of the play.

Now, 16 years after that first Cup, and two years after his death, Dalgarno's take on our national game could seem like his attempt to fit in, in hindsight. Whatever the case may be, they bridge the gap between past and present, Kiwi and Aussie, left and right, very snugly indeed.

Exhibition

* What: The Rugby Paintings by Roy Dalgarno

* Where: Ferner Galleries, 10 Lorne St

* When: To November 8