John Hurrell – 3 June, 2024

The six new Rohan Wealleans paintings on show at Ivan Anthony typically tease out (as always with Wealleans) the notion of what ‘painting’ consists of. In this case, rubbery acrylic that has been poured into flat trays, laminated, dried and set, is then gouged full of holes with a conical punch to make one work. The scooped-out conical pieces are then used to make another painting/wall sculpture, being glued onto a flat surface in a densely packed formation of protruding ‘mountains’.

Wealleans has been using this technique for some time now and the highly tactile results are always interesting. Here we have Rising Sun, Serpent and the Rainbow and Land of Sunshine as packed fields of conical holes where the coloured edges of the laminations within the slanted apertures are fleetingly revealed as you move around.

Discretely hidden within these fields of tilted apertures are isolated linear drawing elements (like a serpent) which help the viewer make more sense of the titles. These elements are nicely understated.

On another wall we discover the conical multi-coloured protuberances manifest in Rainbow, Pointy Monolith Dark, and Pointy Monolith Dahlia, three smaller (painted, glued and carved) works—bizarre fetish wall-works that beg to be fondled and rubbed-up against. (You have to restrain yourself.) Their colours are much more intense than the ethereal sieve-like larger works, and their three-dimensionality more overt.

Both types seem related in their forms to varieties of coral, sponge, anemone and other types of rippling tubular undersea life—as well as saluting sculptures by great artists like Bourgeois, Saint Phalle and Hesse.

Wealleans’ significance in this country is his innovative approach to the materiality of paint, like that of the Christchurch artist Helen Calder—in both cases remarkably spurning the overt use of brushes or spray, and using transformed layered acrylic (that is then cut into) for the spatial ethos of sculpture. For this reason of transmuting acrylic substance: truly exciting artists—both.

John Hurrell

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