Ray Thorburn Exhibition

by Jill Marchbanks

Ray Thorburn's paintings have been hanging in the library for a fortnight. Have you noticed them? Have you wallowed in the glossy sensuality Thorburn claims his colour carries, or do paintings come and go and come, while you remain stacked up in study hall.

If you do look you'll find three things happening- colour, optical illusion, modular arrangement. The colour thing is the big gas says Thorburn. He lays on strips of masking tape, zooms down to the car painter and sprays on layers and layers of glossy colour. If Mr T. doesn't do it the guys at the garage do it for him. In other words the paintings are anonymously executed. What he aims for is a super-sensual colour experience. (Have you had any lately?) The people who look at Thorburn's paintings seeing only lines and lines and wondering how he got the marking tape so good are walking in darkness. The people who look at a dark red painting and think only of blood [unclear: don-ars] day have missed worsely. What Thorburn says is to forget fire-engines, cherries and chairman Mao. Forget all connections and associations. Discover Red. Discover the pure colour forces of redness in red. ( Note for the nostalgic - remember the big yellow painting in the Recent British Painters' Show.)

This kind of discovery happens in Thorburns paintings not just through colours in isolation but in the mutual unfolding of juxtaposed colours of equal or nearly equal saturation. Or in the black/white/silver painting through the influence of warm through to cool colour on these so-called 'achromatic' colours—no-colour extremes in which Thorburn uncovers the life.

But for this artist, the life he sees lurking in the principles of art doesn't really have too much to do with land and people and the miniscule activities of insects in his back garden. Like that of most painters today, Thorburn's work is based on the premise that the knowledge and appreciation of materials and their special functioning is more important than information restricted to the visible facts of nature. Quite specifically he paints about painting — he's a Post-Abstract Expressionist - or a painting painter. Painting painters can be emotive without cluttering the canvas with bared souls, sensual without dragging in sentiment and nostalgia. Thorburn sees himself as part of the international scene - free from being just one of the New Zealand boys. His modular paintings began partly as a reaction against his own early abstract expressionist work, partly because of his strong personal feelings about the parochial atitudes of the NZ landscape Art Scene. Thorburns themselves are eminently buyable. Rather frighteningly, Thorburn-type formulae are bound to be ultra successful on the true-blue office executive market. They're safe, geometric, office-blocktidy. But they are not all good, and the good are not always unlimitedly good. Method and formula are not enough — only one who feels something about painting can paint about painting.

Thorburn's ideas about painting are not just fixed to the painted surface. Space is freed within the surface through optical illusion although the paintings are not primarily 'op art'. Outside the picture the arrangement potential of the modules allows for the incorporation of surrounding space. Thorburn makes his paintings in the form of modules so that they can be arranged imaginatively and physically. One arrangement in the library shows space incorporated in the painting as void - as in sculpture. What is the response he seeks from the onlooker? Response to colour and shape both within and without the paintings - fit them into their surroundings, lay them across ceilings, down walls, across floors, destroy, create, Play, people, play. Thorburn has real trouble with adults. Their minds miss the playgrounds of sensual colour and wander off in fruitless expeditions of message-seeking. Kids understand best what I'm doing says Thorburn.