Blooming All Over

By Mark Amery

It’s spring, and there’s a small rash of fertile abstraction on show around dealers in Wellington, celebrating the organic reproductive frisson of the season.

Any concern a few years back that painting might have hit a cul de sac by getting too clean and dry has been wiped away by the fresh, lively abstraction in galleries, roughening up the edges of pop and geometric abstraction. Strong examples round Wellington in 2010 thus far have included Kathy Barry at Bowen Galleries, Rohan Wealleans at Hamish McKay, Lorraine Rastorfer at Mark Hutchins, Arie Hellendoorn at Suite, and Andre Hemer at Bartley and Company.

Currently having her fourth show at South Coast Gallery in Cuba Street, Amy Melchior‘s work has come leaps and bounds with her new series ‘Going Dotty’. Spring here is a series of birthing pools with seductive rippling surfaces, full of schools of shooting spores and sprats, shoots unraveling and new cells bubbling up from the deep. The energy is intoxicating, the mood both celebratory and prickly. Melchior has developed a technique where she builds up painted encaustic layers (beeswax and resin), which is then engraved into to create a sculptural surface. Smelling of honey and robust to the touch, the work manages to speak of both the sensual fluidity and structural strength of nature. Melchior’s work is a many-layered exploration of microcosmic natural forces, the artist working to create a balance of elements in each rich slice of expressionistic matter.

The titles signal these works as about pleasure but, as with any true pleasure, there’s a darker, stickier undercurrent with scratchy forms caught within. Melchior’s biggest challenge is finding a cohesion in these compositions, which proves more difficult in some of the more sickly sweet multi-coloured works. In love with the organic structure to be found in natural chaos, her work often balances on the edge of curdling. The best are anchored by strong tensions. Works where there are strong underwater to-and-fro circular drifting motions across the surface of the deep pools. Where, just as swelling orbs are rising into view from the deep, they are pulling with them nets and other encasements.
 
A smaller series on show are dedicated to the habitat of the honey-bee. Some are infused with a honeyed golden light while encaustic forms and engraved marks across the surface present wild overgrown clusters of flowers and spores, their energy scattered yet unified.

The current show at Hamish McKay is notable as the first solo showing from Australian artist Matthys Gerber in New Zealand. It brightly spurts, copulates and flowers in a shower of propagation through interacting shape and colour, like the most evocative showing of orchids you’ve ever seen.

Completed as part of a residency at the University of Canterbury, with Theo Schoon’s abstract legacy as new inspiration, these large landscape-shaped works are a bit of a throw back to the decorative op art of the 60s. Yet Gerber’s playful experimentation with the melodic interaction of high key colours and sinuous shapes is fruitful in terms of a conversation between abstraction and representation, and organic irregularity and machine-regulation. They resemble Rorschach inkblot tests except for the fact that every time you expect a shape to be mirrored there’s an irregularity. It’s as if the canvases are moving screens, with programmed shape and colour patterns sprouting, baroque-like into unexpected new ornamental forms.

In reproduction they look to have a poster-like sheen, but in situ they’re actually quite sloppy in application, the artist working a la Mondrian in oil. I found this detracting rather than painterly, as if the works were knocked off on holiday. More of Gerber’s work from Australia on show in New Zealand would be welcome.

Paul Hartigan paints with neon, and his colourful squiggles of tubes in The Vapours at Page Blackie also provide a jolt of accomplished abstract music into Spring programming. My favourites are the tondo works because of their bodily exuberance. Primary colours whirl between two driving rods in a way that makes the work feel like an action painting conducted with a Max Gimblett-like expressive gesture, employing both arms. 

Funnily, gallery programming does sometimes inadvertedly feel seasonable, with darker work popping up over winter. Next year I vote for more of this colour brightening up the greyer months.

Amy Melchior, Going Dotty, South Coast Gallery, until 2 October
Hamish McKay Gallery, until 2 October
Paul Hartigan, Page Blackie Gallery, until 9 October