Darkness on the edge of town

By Mark Amery

It was perhaps telling of how the geography of the art world has been shifting that at this month’s Auckland Art Fair – essentially New Zealand’s contemporary art fair - the number of Wellington art dealers selling their wares (seven) was only just above those from Melbourne and Sydney apiece. The South Island meanwhile, where there have been several gallery closures, was represented by only two – one, Dunedin’s Brett McDowell Gallery, rather smartly only representing works on paper.

You’d have been hard pressed however to have guessed there was a recession on. Black and gold bedecked crowds flocked to a spacious venue on the Viaduct Basin surrounded by floating mansions. All enjoying the best cherry-picked sellable selection of contemporary Australian art alongside our own I’ve ever seen.

New Wellington stall on the block was Newtown-based Suite, who of all the Capital’s galleries there reflected an increasing international eclecticism. Not only do they represent a number of contemporary European artists, they also trade from the estates of such seemingly incongruous matches as the light filled dreamy pastel works of the late Fritz Klein (Yves Klein’s father) and our own master modern illustrator E Mervyn Taylor.

Yet as Suite’s exhibition history and stable has built over 18 months, introducing established New Zealand artists and plenty of exciting well chosen new Wellington blood, a strong sense of how they might talk in a fresh way to one another across history, geography and approach has started to reveal itself.

Back home in Suite’s Owen Street gallery, Swedish-based British artist James Aldridge and Titahi Bay lad Wayne Youle could even be said to share some of the graphic design and seductive folkloric interests of Klein and Taylor, but in a very different era.

Aldridge’s current claim to fame is a large painting commission in the restaurant of London’s Tate Modern, which has strong connections with the impressive work on display at Suite. Both Youle and Aldridge’s work reflect a contemporary eclectic gobbling up of graphic styles, popular culture and iconography, where the memento mori (“be mindful of death”) world of the tattoo and the heavy metal album cover talk to their high art and folk roots.

With sinuous baroque excess in both his paintings and paper cut-outs, Aldridge’s work pushes together a confluence of scenic design traditions as if his was a dark gothic forest of intertwining hybrids made out of wallpaper. Aldridge freewheels assuredly across the canvas with folk-hokey and familiar fabric patterns, and a painter’s armoury of perspectives as if he were Jackson Pollock as embroiderer.   

Aldridge compares his paintings to the music he listens to - a hilarious list that ranges from Black Metal to Death Doom and Sludge. The playfulness of this list is an indication of the Tony De Lautour-like humour and love of cultural collisions that his work is full of. Around staple symbols like crows, wolves and skulls, the wreathes of smoke and leaves, birdwing-crowded sky and streams of blood ensure a potent atmosphere which is both evocative in meaning and beautiful in the abstract. 

One of Youle’s tricks is also to tilt the overly familiar into new positions. To make us consider where we stand in relation to our icons and how much we might still value them. Here that’s simply done with the reproduction of the New Zealand flag in muted tones as a rug. Echoing Youle’s earlier ‘Turangawaewae’ doormats, in effect he asks whether this rug is something you feel comfortable standing on, or owning?

Elsewhere Gordon Walter’s kowhaiwhai turn into skull and crossbones and Peter Robinson characters into family trophies, as Youle mercilessly robs New Zealand art and iconography with pop art piractical glee. Even Aldridge is not safe, one of his ravens appearing in the showstopper painting here, The Devil makes Work for Idle Hands. This painting is part Aldridge, part recent Chris Heaphy and Shane Cotton, a kaleidoscope of New Zealand art and popular icons..

Youle pushes the magpie creed of the designer to new lengths. He’s been taking other artists’ ideas and twisting them to new hybrid conclusions for a while now (his tiki and Ricky Swallow like lollipops easy examples) but as often as I go to write some of these tactics off as cheap, empty gestures with only limited conceptual pop, I also can’t help admiring him for having the eye to always find them and keep on pushing.

His first exhibition in Wellington in a few years, this show suggests he’s been growing in the interim, sprinkled as it is with more enduring work. Ink painting ‘4 x NZ’ is a deceptively simple Walters-like swastika that, like a Mondrian keeps drawing you in, while his small, smart wall sculptures beautifully balance differently valued materials like resin and greenstone. They pay homage to his own version of James Aldridge’s dark folk forest - the New Zealand public bar.

A Darker Kind of Light Heartedness, Wayne Youle and Sworn to the Dark, James Aldridge, Suite Gallery, until 30 May