To live in the current age is to be subject to a sense of impending doom. Climate change has moved from theory to disturbing reality. Partisan politics at home and abroad have dissolved into a bun fight, and social inequity is coming to a head. Even as we pay for the mistakes of our predecessors, we sow the seeds of future discontent, to be reaped in turn by our children.
Gisborne-born, Auckland-based painter Andrew Barns-Graham faces this reckoning head-on in a series of seven portraits, showing at Havelock North’s Muse Gallery.
His subjects could be the product of an AI prompt of a typical art gallery goer – if the AI in question were somewhat depressed. Each woman stares accusingly from the canvas, demanding moral inventory from the viewer with unflinching eyes.
Eyes of different colours are a genetic rarity. Yet, here they are in abundance, giving the impression that the subjects are somehow special, and, perhaps, that today’s society is a zero-sum game – that existence is impossible without exploitation, even if that exploitation takes place without our knowledge or control.
They have a paradoxically homogenous individuality – a trendy blue rinse here, an asymmetrical fringe there – on the safe edge of edgy. The detail with which the figures are rendered in oils – the cleanness of lines, the perfection of shading, devoid of visible brush strokes – contrasts with the simple landscapes and dull skies against which they are set. While the women are in sharp focus, the background is allowed a little looseness giving the sense that the world is crumbling around them.
