John Hurrell – 30 March, 2025

Australian painter Laith McGregor last exhibited in Auckland nine years ago: a series of fascinatingly innovative portraits at the time. The current clever presentation is a quite different suite of blue/green figures and curvaceous, linear, letter-based relief sculptures rendered as drooping wands.

Focussing on the portable accoutrements of stage magician acts as subject matter, it is cleverly layered and rich in paradoxical references: an easy ‘pantomime’ show to get obsessively absorbed with. Expressive made-up green faces and juggling balls galore.

McGregor’s paintings (canvases resting on shelves) appear influenced by early Picasso or the Italian painters of seventies’ Transavangardia, like Enzo Cucchi or Sandro Chia. They are melancholic and emotionally intense, whilst being stylised and tidy.

Featuring stiffly posed, skull-capped, whitefaced Pierrot figures, they emphasise a mannequinlike physiognomy: particularly the hands (essential for sleight of hand, card tricks and juggling) focussing on wooden, jointed, flexible fingers. There is a droll detached sense of humour throughout, suggesting also cynical affinities with visual artists, especially in politics.

For example, the largest work references the famous ‘three monkeys’ concept of ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,’ using miming figures instead of apes. The canvases have circles cut out to represent see or hear no evil, and a blank speech bubble for not speaking.

These paintings are charming, perhaps too much so—with a surfeit of sweetness. Or are we, the viewers, being showered with irony with his references to empty vocal, visual or aural content? Is he saying something serious through the sad clown about artists and art audiences? That any crap will keep them happy? That it doesn’t matter what goes into ‘the art space’?

Perhaps though McGregor is talking about an indifferent universe. Maybe he is referring to some sort of metaphysical impotence with his worrisome painting title and clever ceramic sculptures where odd floppy wands demonstrate where magic has failed or turned hostile? The usual formulaic performative routines are not co-operating.

In fact, with one work, S.O.S., the tobacco-filled art elements themselves, like the large work with three miming figures, seem to be appealing for help in gaining the moral high ground—for even the normally beneficial wand is doubling as a striking snake or cancer-causing cigarette.

Magic appears here to now work for the forces of evil as well as the forces of good. Positive values are reversed. Normal assumptions have fled out the window, offering disturbingly destructive elements: some new alternative possibilities.

John Hurrell

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