All in the Framing

By Mark Amery

I well remember the heady, sensory wallop of first seeing a Van Gogh Sunflower painting for real at London’s National Gallery. Like most of us, for years previously I had been subjected to countless dull printed reproductions of these celebrated Still Lives. I had come to associate them with the most unadventurous of wallpaper. It was only seeing an actual painting that their explosive textural and colour payload dropped. The experience summed up for me that often remarked upon strange experience last century for New Zealanders of viewing modernism through reproduction.

In one of a pair of works from 2006 entitled ‘Untitled (Van Gogh in Auckland)’ the late Julian Dashper manages to distill down in a digital print that sensory potency into a concentrated square field of sunflower yellow, framed by a deeper yellow. It’s as if one of Van Gogh’s heavy painted flower heads has been ground down, like a poppy into powder, for international art-drug trafficking.

Featured in Adam Art Gallery’s current collection of shows, Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past, here finally is the sunflower print that comes closest to my physical experience. Fancy at the beginning of a new century, a computer generated printed minimalist abstract containing the physical power of a descriptive painting from the previous end of modernism’s century.

Dashper’s work asks all sorts of great questions about art history, the hierarchy of different media and their relation to how we live with art in our daily lives. The source material for the work’s design (not seen here) is actually the design of a catalogue for an exhibition of Van Gogh’s work in Auckland in 1975. Dashper recounts how aged 15 he took the overnight train from Wellington to Auckland for one day to see the exhibition ‘Van Gogh in Auckland’. “What I thought most about on the train trip home that same night,” writes Dashper, “was firstly the fact that the exhibition consisted of `only' eight of Van Gogh's works (it was advertised as a `blockbuster' show after all) and secondly that the catalogue (which I had dutifully purchased as evidence of my visit) was so resolutely abstract in its jacket design. From that day on, more or less, I began to slowly realise that in art (as in life) what you first see is seldom what you first get.”

Dashper reminds us that even if you get to see the original painting, how you experience art can mean everything. The two Dashper works exhibited here are, rather neatly, hung back to back. While the print with its shot of bright colour faces into the gallery, in the gallery’s front window a painting a white painted square presents an empty space as mirror to the world.

The white painted square is in fact a primed jute canvas square, as if Dashper is inviting you to mentally paint a work upon it. It is mounted on and framed by a hessian-covered square –a material much used on the walls of galleries in the 1970s. It contains flecks of paint from the expressive action of applying the primer onto the canvas that sits upon it. This work has teased me all summer long. I’ve been drawn back to the window several times to the questions it asks. It’s as if a hundred years of painting has been drolly rolled clean.

This pair form part of a set of exhibitions the Adam Art Gallery have up till this Sunday, of which Gavin Hipkins’ Bible Studies (New Testament) is also a must-see. Like Van Gogh, Untitled (Van Gogh in Auckland) particularly however needs to be visited, rather than seen in reproduction. It is the best possible memorial for the loss last year of one of our most accomplished and rigorous artists. It is enduring works like these that can majestically fill us in the wake of such tragedy.

If Dashper taught us anything it was art’s power to frame the chatter and clutter of the rest of our lives. The brave open faces of these two works might at first seem blank to newcomers, but stay with them for a while. Trust that in their framing bristle thoughts that curl through their vacancy in as complex and elegant a way as line and colour did once through Van Gogh’s flowers in a vase.

Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past, Adam Art Gallery, until 7 February