CINDY LEONG

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My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

Agnes Martin

Leong’s paintings, with their quiet atmosphere and exquisite marriage of intuition and structure, simultaneously situate themselves within the aesthetic traditions of minimalism and the influence of her own heritage. The paintings possess a gentle and inevitable hybridity, where gesture exists as evidence of communicative intent while remaining liberated from the complex weight of authorship.

Leong’s use of regular cadence feels almost mantra-like, yet the apparent repetition is never offered without heightened feeling and awareness. Instead, it serves her deeper desire to uncover an intangible, metaphysical existence through the objective expression of the physical and the spiritual. 

 

Her largely reduced tonal palette allows a space to emerge that quietly vibrates between the dermis of the paintings and the half-shadow that exists between their viscous gestures. One thinks of Tanizaki’s recollection in In Praise of Shadows of Louis Kahn’s observation: “The sun never knew how wonderful it was until it fell on the wall of a building.” The undulating topography of Leong’s surfaces fulfils a similar possibility. 

The accumulation of her brushstrokes resists obvious pattern and system. Instead, they form a natural, web-like cohesion that holds the composition just sufficiently for us to feel that what we are apprehending is transitory— like holding water.

Agnes Martin’s statement makes it evident that memory or rather a shared consciousness is as vital to the apprehension of painting, as is “what is seen.” Leong’s paintings very much evidence that vision itself is an act of remembrance – that the constituency of the painting, its union of material and gesture, is a celebration of perception and recollection.

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ROBERT MALHERBE

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Let’s get lost
Lost in each other’s arms
Let’s get lost
Let them send out alarms

Let’s Get Lost, Chet Baker

 

Paint can clearly be disorderly – yet off the shelf, seductively packaged in its shiny taut tube, it feels neat and contained, spring-loaded with potential. However, once liberated, its nature and behaviour shifts, so that if this unruly material is to morph into a meaningful carrier of subject, content and impact, it’ll need coercion and finessing and all with the help of a brush and a knife.
 
I know Robert Malherbe welcomes these unreasonable challenges. Looking at his gloriously viscous paintings one can imagine his excitement as the pigment emerges from its cocoon – immediately expanding in search of a transformative state. All that is required is imagination, cognition, dexterity, judgement, sensitivity, patience, touch, and time. Ought to be easy.

 

Trouble is when one looks at painting often, it seems that most have access to, at best, just a few of these attributes. Few access all, and fewer still have any in abundance. We’re convinced that Robert Malherbe has been blessed with the full buffet, but the paintings are not driven by the desire to display nor indulge these capacities. In fact, Malherbe’s paintings are determinedly modest. What he regards is often familiar, unsurprising – even when they are intimate – the manner in which he uses paint to build a material metaphor is humble and honest, and therein lies its power. 

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“What I’m trying to do with painting is take in this visual world and make something of it that is uniquely mine” 

Robert Malherbe 

Malherbe’s painting rests fundamentally on swift, perceptive observation rather than the ‘patient’, (read laborious) scrutiny. The latter is more likely to end in competent description and that’s way less interesting. What he sets out to secure is a fugitive state that captures the energy and torsion of what’s in front of him – exactly the quality that is the first causality of description.

In a sense, paint is not well suited to stasis, and many, having let it out of the tube, then try to tame it, as if they want to put it back in… indeed, the idea that an inherently unstable visual world might best be analysed and made sense of by an unruly, viscous material wed to an utterly irrational process is odd, but then happily, so is painting.

 

Painting as he does, both ‘plein air’ and from ‘life’ in the studio, means there are constraints of time and conditions. This simultaneous compression and attenuation of time is one of the allures of “getting lost” in making (and looking at) a painting. The visual data required to make a good painting is extensive, but the expression is a kind of shorthand. The best paintings seem to fold these seemingly competing notions into the material, so that they can be both immediate and fresh, and yet carry a patina and dimension that stretches time. I have the sense looking at Robert Malherbe’s paintings, that his relationship to making is a love affair, just as Baker describes, Robert wilfully gets lost, lost in the arms of painting.
 
That he returns time and again to these subjects may be less about their intrinsic qualities, and more about absorbing and understanding the way that he himself sees and re-adjusts the coordinates of vision and understanding that he has come to rely on. But as I say this, why wouldn’t one wish to religiously regard a sunset, a flower or the curve of a hip? 

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SHILA KHATAMI

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Shila Khatami paints with a gesture brimming with glorious contradictions. There should be nothing discrete about a mark that covers so much territory with such directional urgency – and yet these wide, dissipating strokes can at times be delicate, translucent – almost veil-like.

Andrew Jensen

The gestures’ progress across expansive linen fields feels both determined yet open. The openness of the gesture, its freedom from graphic obligation allows it to remain untethered to description of anything, other than its own purposeful movement and character. But let’s be clear these are not fetishized gestures claiming divine inspiration – no “kabuki” theatre here. Nor do these performative strokes speak only to process. Such insularity ignores the context and the environment that Khatami paints in and this feels relevant.

Where other painters – one thinks of Soulage or Ufan for example, who willed their brushstrokes to denote gravity and authenticity, Khatami seems to want to liberate the brushstroke from showmanship and ultimately from the confinement and (mostly misplaced) reverence that such performance insinuates and demands.

Exempt from these “cultivated” aspirations, Khatami’s work on occasion abandons the support entirely, steps off the stretcher and into the void, colliding with the wall, the floor and putting us further inside its roving anatomy.

Unquestionably there is a gritty, ‘graf-like’ energy to some of Khatami’s works, happily infected by the backyard-aesthetics of her Berlin studio – but my sense is that as “urban” as these works might appear at first look, there is a subtler and more metaphysical dimension to her work – qualities that emerge through her regime of making and the judgement she possesses.

These are paintings that weave personal intent with an open, osmotic embrace of environment. Their synthesis of the personal and the empirical feels considered – natural.

 

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BILL CULBERT

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Bill Culbert was less interested in the minimalist language of fellow “fluorescent” Dan Flavin and more connected to the conceptual footprint left by Dada.  His life, spread as it was between two geographical poles, two landscapes, two differently illuminated worlds meant that his own practice was destined to straddle contradiction – the found and the finessed, the poetic and the conceptual, the light and the dark.

Andrew Jensen

Born in Port Chalmers in 1935, Bill Culbert divided his time between London, Croagnes, France, and New Zealand.

Predominantly interested in light – he dedicated his life to a profound, poetic investigation of it.  “My primary exploration is about light – light-marks in space or light-in-light, light in darkness, night-light, daylight, those kinds of things just intrigue me.” Illumination and shadow, transparency and reflection work together in the most powerful of his works. He used naturally available light, the sun and all its iterations, and when he wanted light to pour out of objects from where it could not exist, he turned to the controllable light, fluorescence, and incandescence, both new and old technology.

 

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Bill began incorporating the found object into his work in the 1970s. New, recycled – and readily available utilitarian elements. Corrugated iron, florescent tubes, window frames, glass and plastic bottles. Suitcases, chairs, lamps, wood, and metal. Tied to his concerns for the environment, materials were collected and accumulated until needed, and he delighted in the ability of ordinary things to capture the imagination, to transcend their original uses, and to spark our interest. Often humorous, always beautiful. 
 
Culbert had his first solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1977 and participated in the first Auckland Triennial in 2001. In 2013 he represented New Zealand in the 55^th Venice Bennale, with an installation entitled Front Door Out Back.  Permanently commissioned Culbert sculptures may be found in London, Wellington and Auckland. Amongst his most notable collaborations were his explorations with Ralph Hotere, (Aupori). With one of the most beloved, Fault, a rip of light, permanently installed on the façade of the City Gallery, Wellington. 
 
He was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to art, particularly sculpture, in 2008. Bill passed away at his home in Provence in 2019, 3 years after this wife, the artist Pip Culbert. 
 
Bill has been called on of the ‘most singular and significant contemporary artists from the late twentieth century’, and Fox Jensen McCrory is humbled and honoured to be representing him in New Zealand, and beyond. 

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KOEN DELAERE

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These may even be contemporary examples of Harold Rosenberg’s “action paintings”. Certainly they are “not a picture but an event” and though they eschew the pictorial as Rosenberg would’ve wished, there is a revealed metaphorical quality in the fundamental dualism, something that is at the heart of their making and their manifestation and that imbues them with symbolic character. 

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In the studio of Koen Delaere, you know that the absolute reverse ambition is in play for painting. In the Delaere laboratory there is a genuine anatomy class underway – the body is being undressed, dissected, pushed, and pulled and then reformed, all to a rollicking soundtrack from The Velvet Underground to The Cramps. On the flatlands of Tilburg there is much gothic drama afoot (think Mary Shelley) because Koen Delaere is making paintings that “want to live”. Painting can and ought to be transformative in the way that music can be, but only if it is analogue and unplugged – played live and loud.
 
Working on the floor, Delaere bulldozes paint, binder, ink et al, mostly along a vertical axis that leaves outrageous accumulations of material moraine at the terminations of the movement and indeed along the central seam. In the wake of these axial movements are wondrous tracks and strata that reveal sweeps of colour and energy. The deeper geology of the paintings are exposed through repeated excavations and what is unearthed by this persistent quarrying are rich seams of colour and form, of new structure and dynamism. The writer Michael Ondaatje said that “as a writer, one is busy with archaeology”. This ought to be equally true for a painter and most certainly is for Delaere.

These are paintings that are fulsome and immoderate. At times they can seem borderline bombastic, but thank goodness, because each painting demonstrates Delaere’s preparedness to lose it all in pursuit of the form and wild chromatic adventure that these singular paintings can evoke.
 
It is because of Delaere’s conviction to the activity of painting – both as a vital conceptual and aesthetic act, that he is able to restore our (occasionally) flagging faith in paintings’ ability to deliver an utterly embracing experience.

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If you ever watched the late and very great Joe Strummer play guitar it was a triumph of physicality over finesse. One strum up, one strum down. Strummer never claimed to be Eric Clapton (& would’ve hated the very idea I’m sure) but he was convinced of the communicative power of music and of “taking action”.

I only saw The Clash play once – way back in 1983 and I can still recall it – sonically, visually and atmospherically – it was very loud, very luminous and very “close”. 

I’ve not watched Koen Delaere paint but looking at these intensely visceral paintings, they declare critical aspects of their making in the amount of material evidence that survives the performance. A combination of forceful gestures, almost always along a north-south axis, strong-arms pigment, bulldozing it to the top and bottom. But as physical as these paintings are they are also highly finessed and complex. 

Delaere’s cocktail of pigments, which include pigments, inks, mediums together with binders, gives his paint a radical, viscous body that is revealed as it is disassembled.

The process of erasure that follows the laying down of paint, more as geoligical sediment than underpainting, feels primal, as if the works were built by a brutal tectonic jolt which set the processes in action. But again, look closely and you can see these hidden sedimentary layers act like deep strata that are only revealed through mindfully, repeated actions. 

Two gestures, north/south, full/empty, thick/thin, push/pull – this visceral union of opposing forces is undeniably essential, dramatic and visually compelling. 

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MARK FRANCIS

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Paint is a membrane; brushes are instruments of inquest and yet who would’ve thought that such an apparently inquiring and methodological approach would give rise to such beauty and mystery. Well anyone who’s has looked at a night sky or looked through a microscope and understood that true beauty is in fact not skin deep but is held in the hitherto invisible layers. 

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For those of us raised on the “shaky isles” of New Zealand, Mark Francis’s painting Jericho resembles the exaggerated sweep of an overly sensitive seismograph whose dramatic peaks and troughs record subterranean volatility. Much of this oscillation is neither felt, seen nor heard, but it’s always there, pulsing away beneath the crust, biding its time.

I must admit that these particular paintings of Mark’s also put me in mind of Joy Divisions seminal album cover for Unknown Pleasures – an album that seemed to completely realign the tectonic plates of contemporary music – taking the dystopian angst of punk and adding a garnish of Brechtian unease and a new refined sense of aesthetics.

Oddly, Francis’s title Jericho summons one of the few bible stories I can recall – the Israelites felling the walls of Jericho with the accumulated volume and persistence of their trumpets – think Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia on endless repeat. The pitch and vibration finally shaking loose the foundations and the mortar. This is surely a story about Sound and Vision, about its potential for reciprocal impact.

In Plastic Soul, Jericho is accompanied by a sound composition by Andy Cowton. Spend time in the room and the experience of one stimulus begins to unequivocally “synaesthese” with the other. Yet Cowton’s composition doesn’t seek to operate as an analogy for Francis’s painting – they don’t seek to explain each other – they are simply happy companions in a space – one optic, one aural. 

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The second work by Mark Francis is Transverse Wave. Larger still than Jericho, one senses that Transverse Wave has him working at full Vitruvian stretch, though a recent visit to his London studio made it clear that he is capable of working on even larger seismic fields.

The surface of the Transverse Wave feels as if it is established by a syncopated rhythm of deft, repeated gestures that tug at the deeper structural fabric of the painting. As if pulling on a thread so to unravel the weave – and with it, something of the stability of vision.

If Jericho charts the indetectable quiver of seismic activity, then Transverse Wave also works to make imperceptible vibration visible. One can’t help but feel that we are apprehending this with the aid of a large scope. It is as if Francis is putting us inside the braid of sound – where the scratch, flickers and blips gather in crescendos at the intersections of the painting’s weave.

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As much as Albers wished as a student to eschew convention his work touches lightly on various 20^th century moments. One feels echoes of Judd and Chamberlain in their robust materiality and determined “object” status, the visceral impact of Fontana’s puncturing of the picture plane in his “chain-saw” lacerations. But there are also reverberations in form and composition that recall his namesake Anni Albers’ refined geometries or Frank Stella’s shaped canvases. Critically though Jan’s work has an extraordinary sense of contemporaneity. As cognizant as he clearly is of history, he feels determined to extend his own artistic vocabulary so that it embraces a range of connections both to architecture, even the environment complete with its blend of allure and toxicity.

There is no conceptual or fashionable expediency in this recycling urge but simply Albers work occasionally converts the low-brow and discarded – in a spirit closer to Dada perhaps than it is to a mindful recycling ethos. Stephen Berg has described…“the entire picture is actually a permanent construction site alternating between destruction and repair.” This altercation between making and unmaking, harmony and disharmony runs through all of his work. One gets the sense that Albers views most material as potentially “uncooperative” and unruly – something to be tamed or at the very least bridled.

In all of his works you are compelled to look into them rather than at them from a respectful distance – the enticement and persuasion of the poisonous perhaps. Their complex topography, their nooks and crannies, their structural depth and intricacy suggest an entirely different reading of space that isn’t pictorial nor is it truly sculptural. Whatever the case Albers is certainly up-dating the bas-relief and its traditional viewpoint.

Standing in his Dusseldorf studio on a hot summers day there was a heady mix of fumes – glues, paints and resins perhaps. The works installed were magnificent and various. From the faceted elegance of his bronze wall reliefs to the nigh-on chromatic virulence of his painted cardboard vitrines you could sense a certain joyful investigation – a testing of how material can be tested, strained and transformed in a playful and determined alchemy of trial and error.

– Andrew Jensen

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And whilst Bustin’s work fundamentally behaves as painting, this integration of objects, many with an implied domesticity, not only alter their relationship to the wall but they allow for this deeper range of association and allegory with their careful blend of familiarity and ambiguity.

Small paintings on wood and canvas nestle alongside panels stretched with a variety of sheer materials. These translucent panels are only obliged to carry fragile stains and traces of pigment therefore revealing much of the architecture of the support…the skeleton beneath the skin. I thought fleetingly of Robert Irwin’s installations where columns of coloured light are seen through large translucent skins. But there is nothing systemic in Bustin’s approach whatsoever and the formalism that underpins his larger sequences of rooms is entirely absent in Bustin’s intimate and very felt works.

The dialogue between the hidden and the revealed, the substantial and intricate runs through much of her work. The notion of the concealed is reinforced when panels of differing scales and depths coalesce into larger conglomerates where only partial edges are visible. It is almost as if there is no “front” to her work – an oblique view, equally legitimate. Her use of highly polished copper panels even makes what is behind or to the side of the viewer an “aspect” of the works. The intense coloured edges spill colour onto the wall itself inviting further scrutiny from the flanks. Thus everything conspires to defeat a single pictorial viewpoint as Bustin’s work reveals itself to be driven by movement.

Bustin’s recent work The Nijinsky Project – Faun makes this explicit. A performance combining dance, composition and installation in a homage to iconic dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.  The placement of each assemblage establishes coordinates for the performance space and each element is further calibrated to the human body, or more particularly their height relates to the specifics of individual dance “positions”.

The consideration of Bustin’s selections, the fine ceramics and porcelain, the diaphanous materials and the blushes and traces of pigment, combine to serve as triggers for feeling, even a nostalgia for material and for touch and to elicit our own sensitivities.

Seldom do we encounter amidst the clamour and theatre of much contemporary work, such sensuality and modesty as Bustin’s work contains. For this reason alone it seems even more vital – not that she is obliged to swim against this tide but this coalition of refined tactility and material is key to resuscitating our sensory capacity.

In 2019 Jane Bustin completed a residency in Latvia at The Mark Rothko Memorial Fund.

– Andrew Jensen

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