Featured in ARTZONE Issue No. 49 2013
Sanjay says that right now painting seems “inappropriate” – the painting as object and luxurious commodity in a place stuffed with objects but unattainable for so many, superfluous and irrelevant. “I’m not looking for anything” he says, “but everything is surprising. So I’m taking photographs, but not with an expensive camera – just a small low res phone camera – which seems right somehow for India.” A MIG fighter, pinioned in a garden. The plane’s elegance, its delta wings and sculpted nose doesn’t alter the fact that MIGs were used by the Indian Air Force against Pakistan during the late 60’s and early 70’s. The photograph is a balance of light and shade, or menace and beauty: the plane thrusts darkly across a cloudless sky, its silhouette exposes the sheen of the bomb attached to its fuselage, and the fact that it’s much bigger than the surrounding trees and walls emphasises its destructive power. In India, however, the urge to remember competes with a lackadaisical approach to maintenance: In the warplane is stuck on small poles on a pitted concrete dome in a memorial park. It’s cracked, broken and powerless and a satellite dish squashed into a tiny space has its wires protected by an upended plastic bucket.Superman and friends, photograph, 2013
But collisions of memory and abandonment, of order, chaos and energy galvanises Sanjay’s practice. He was driving along a motorway recently when he came across a saleyard of abandoned statues. Superman, without his head, is brandishing an aeroplane. Of course. He’s accompanied by a fang-baring tiger, an elephant with suspiciously white tusks, and the remains of what may be a fractured gold idol. Their ersatz companionship jolts you into new thoughts about heroes, power, faith and decay. The photograph is a collision of colour, angles and anarchy: superman’s wide-apart arms and legs are counter-pointed by the tiger’s teeth and the elephant’s fangs, as well a welter of stuff: a swing, stone urns, a solitary column, piles of tyres although they could be anything. The sign with the cell-phone – image and numbers is a testament to the tireless business of survival.
Sanjay has recently obtained a residency at TIFA, the Talera Institute of Fine & Applied Arts (TIFA) affiliated to the University of Pune. This provides him with the opportunity to immerse himself in the local community both as teacher and artist, and establish contacts with gallerists interested in meeting New Zealand artists. “Indians have been in NZ since the 1800’s,” he says. “An Indian guy fell in love with a Maori woman and jumped ship. We’ve got lots of connections and I want to develop them.”
James Ormsby
A 7 : 1 3 PAINTINGS
All works are created this year 2013 using premium Mussini Schmincke oil paint and mediums on Belgium linen over solid wood stretchers. Each work has been signed ‘HEMIO 2013’, Hemio is James Ormsby.
The exhibition will run from the 5th of April until Saturday the 27th
and will be available to view online at paulnache.com.
Paul Nache Gallery
Upstairs 89 Grey Street
Gisborne 4010 New Zealand
Wed-Fri 10-5, Sat 10-2
now@paulnache.com
paulnache.com
+64 6 867 9721
- James Ormsby
- He piko He taniwha - Part I (top diptych)
- Te Ao Mārama: The Natural World - Part II (bottom diptych)
- Mussini Schmincke oil paint and mediums on Belgium linen over solid wood stretchers.
- 4800 (h) x 2000mm (w)
- 2013
- Price on application
Wainui sunrise set in stone » The Gisborne Herald | Johnny Turner at PAULNACHE
Read the latest article by Kristine Walsh on our current exhibiting artist Johnny Turner. The gallery is open Wednesday - Friday 10-5 and Saturday 10-2. The exhibition will run until the 23rd of March.
- Geoff Tune
- x BARCELONA #1-10 (2012)
- Limited edition signed digital prints
- 285x235mm framed
IMG X © the artist and courtesy of PAULNACHE
“The genesis of these works lies in a holiday in Spain Gail and I had with close friends, Malcolm and Lesley Speed in 2008. It concluded with some time in Barcelona. The imagery has evolved from photos of the ceiling of Barcelona Cathedral and is part of a wider and ongoing series of works within the general titles of ‘Sacred Places’, ‘Ritual Spaces’, and ‘Shelter’, based on photos of churches taken on our travels. I see travelling to Europe as a form of pilgrimage, to see and experience places and objects of cultural significance, and as such, it is part of the essence of being a New Zealander of European/British ancestry. In this context I am interested in such things as cultural continuity and connections across time and distance. The works have a connection with a search for, or reaffirmation of, identity. I am interested in churches as these buildings I see as shelters for cosmological rituals that in a variety of ways maintain a degree of basic commonality that extends back into the distant past of the Neolithic and perhaps the Paleolithic. I see analogies between churches, passage tombs, and caves (assuming that these were places of ritual). I am interested in the gap between how these buildings appear today and how they would have been experienced in the past, and the disconnection between superstition and mystery and current knowledge. The Barcelona works gradually evolved into an emphasis on a diagonal cross shaped image that eventually got me thinking about the letter X and the multitude of uses it has acquired such as:
- - Abbreviation for Christ
- - Symbol for the unknown quantity
- - Someone or something arbitrarily designated
- - Indication of hybridity
- - To mark something that is wrong
- - A mark of affirmation or denial, choice or approval
- - To cancel or obliterate
- - A personal mark in lieu of a signature
- - The basic or monoploid number of chromosomes in a polyploid series
- - The number contained in a single genome
- - Roman numeral for 10 (which begins the onward numerical spiral to infinity)
- - 10 consists of a 1 and a 0 being the digital code by with which knowledge is stored and transferred
- Geoff Tune
- Barcelona Banners I-X (2013)
- Acrylic on canvas
- 10 @ 180x90cm ea.
- Johnny Turner
- Get A Life
- 1-23 March 2013
“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god,
for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him.”
José Saramago
Jesus Spells
in GOD FACTOR
The Monastery of St. Martin Tibães, Braga, Portugal
Exhibition: 10 November-22 December 2012
Curated by Inês Valle
IMG X MRHK
“It’s all driven by McLeod’s belief that to remain relevant painting needs to push its own conventions and boundaries, that it can no longer sit quietly and reverentially on the wall. [Buying History] predominately draws from the last two decades of McLeod’s practice. It also makes forays into earlier work to show that despite the apparent huge shifts in his practice, McLeod has remained loyal to core principles around the role and purpose of painting in the contemporary world.”
Aaron Lister, curator at Wellington’s City Gallery describes McLeod’s work as having a ‘riotous exuberance’ and notes that the paintings have rejected their modernist origins. The paintings are driven instead by a need to acquire new forms and energies, coming out of the frame and off the wall to invade the physical and psychological spaces of the viewer. McLeod arrived in Wellington in 1972 after graduating with a Diploma of Art, Drawing and Painting in 1969 at the Glasgow School of Art. Inspired by the abstraction of Alan Davie and Willem de Kooning, McLeod rebelled against the system in Glasgow and landed in Wellington brandishing a form of international modernism. He enjoyed success in the Wellington art scene as evidenced by purchases of his work in the Te Papa Tongarewa collection during the 1970s.
However after “a couple of sell out shows I decided I didn’t want to get pinned down by that type of painting. I much preferred to operate on the fringes. I wasn’t ready for early success and rejected it, becoming an outsider in both places - Scotland and New Zealand. But I found an easy fit into an alternative tradition here”.
Now, after spending decades working through various processes and painterly formats, Lister says, “McLeod has arrived at something totally unique, painting that’s riotous and over the top yet deadly serious. He’s developed an approach to painting that’s totally invested in the history of the medium, at times turns to traditional techniques and even subjects, but pushes these things much further than a lot of people think they should go. And its not over. For McLeod the push, the fight, the game is what’s at stake every time he picks up a brush.”
PAULNACHE has represented Scottish-born, Wellington-based painter Robert McLeod since 2005 and this will be the artists 4th solo show with the Gisborne gallery.
Email the gallery or call for purchase info: +64 6 867 9721
