Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to EyeContact. You are invited to respond to reviews and contribute to discussion by registering to participate.

JH

Anthony shows Graham

AA
View Discussion

This six-person group show at Ivan Anthony’s introduces to Aucklanders the work of Wellingtonian David Cauchi.

Auckland

3 February - 20 February 2010                         

 

Graham: A Group Show

David Cauchi, Michael Harrison, Richard Killeen, Tony de Lautour, Rohan Wealleans and Yvonne Todd

This six-person group show at Ivan Anthony’s - a suite of mini-exhibitions by artists normally well known to Anthony visitors - is unusual in that it introduces to Aucklanders the work of Wellingtonian newcomer David Cauchi - many of whose wall drawings adorned the public toilet walls of the Adam Art Gallery during Wall Works last September.


Cauchi’s occasionally mock-Mayan graffiti looks best directly on architectural planar surfaces and not on pinned up pieces of white paper but the latter ink drawings are easier to sell and indicate a witty, albeit cynical (realistic?) sensibility. 

Of the 37 works, my two favourites are: ‘The World’ with its two percentage bar graphs of ‘good shit’ and ‘bad shit’: and ‘The Critic’ with one hand on his erect member and the other gouging out his eyeballs with a dagger – the pleasures and dangers (power and self-hatred) of what Martin Jay calls the ‘scopic regime’ of the modernist gaze.

Killeen’s three digital ‘paintings’ around the corner in the hall, though also graphic, are highly patterned and spatial, and less immediate. Surface here is illusionistically sculpted by ink-jet programming and is densely ornamental. In contrast, a line of sixteen raw Tony de Lautour drawings in the office - on scrap paper and card - are very similar to his recent Te Tuhi show and like Cauchi, also satirical, but less about the art world and more about New Zealand history and white working class frustrations.

While de Lautour likes to render brutal, swaggering oafs with coarse scruffy brush marks that hint of incipient violence, Harrison focuses on delicately rendered, ethereal young women in thin acrylic washes that dwell in another more imagined and longed for world of floating forms. De Lautour bruises and shoulder-charges the viewer into entering his imaginary space while Harrison caresses and coaxes.

Rohan Wealleans’ wall work Horrogami is a simplified version of another work of the same name in the Chartwell collection – but without collaged photographic elements this time. It features yellow and orange spiky cut-paper and glued-on slices of blue marbled paint so that the projecting folded image looks part vulva, part sea anemone, part jeweled but prickly bush – in a curved glass case.

Yvonne Todd’s The Menthol Series (1999) is in five identically sized parts, with a cat with peculiarly rounded ears in its centre. Like with Harrison’s images there is a haunting and restrained gravitas, except that Todd uses an approximate symmetry. Her work’s outer extremes have gentle diagonals (manicured hand holding a white die and chain necklace versus a lily-shaped glass vase toppled over a hardened pool of spilt candle wax); those second in have four verticals (white carnations versus white recently snuffed candles); and the sleepy feline in the middle eyes us with amused suspicion.

While much of this show has been displayed before (like all of Todd and some of Harrison) it is still good to revisit. Cauchi though is a refreshingly surprising component. Hopefully his contributions to the Auckland art scene will be now more frequent.

Print | Facebook | Twitter | Email

 

This Discussion has 1 comment.

Comment

Lil, 10:11 a.m. 8 February, 2010

Looks like a great show. David Cauchi's bar graph feels a little like David Shrigley, sans optimism.

Reply to this thread

Recent Posts by John Hurrell

JH
Installation shot of Veronica Herber's Making My Way Home exhibition at Melanie Roger.

Herber’s Torn Tape Graphite Grids

MELANIE ROGER GALLERY

Auckland

 

Veronica Herber
Making My Way Home


14 November - 7 December 2024

JH
Heather Straka, Age of Discovery The Painter, 2021, archival pigment on Photorag Ultrasmooth, 765 x 1135 mm.

Constructed Straka Photographs

TRISH CLARK GALLERY

Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

 

Heather Straka
Isolation Hotel

 

26 November - 21 December 2024

JH
Winston Roeth, Belmont Quintet, 2024, Kremer pigments and polyurethane dispersion on five slate panels, 50,8 x 168.4 cm

The Pleasures of Chromatic Individuality

FOX JENSEN MCCRORY

Auckland

 

Winston Roeth
The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing

 

16 November - 14 December 2024

 

JH
Milli Jannides, Wide Meshed Nets, 2024, oil on linen and silk, 2400 x 1800 mm

Jannides ‘Abstractions’ & Portraits

COASTAL SIGNS

Auckland

 

Milli Jannides
Shivers


15 November -14 December 2024