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Art

Phillip Trusstrum: Peter McLeavey Galleries until July 12.

Reviewed by Martin Edmond.

An over-the-shoulder comment from a local dignitary reached me, as I went up the stairs and [unclear: he] went down the stairs—it's all old hat—and thought, but did not say—if it weren't, who [unclear: would] wear the new? The habit of asking [unclear: questions] of the air is not an easy one to break [unclear: and] to—does it indeed matter, if the hat's an [unclear: old] and comfy one? The point is however that [unclear: Phillip] Trusstrum's show docs have its surprises, [unclear: albeit] gentle ones, as well as several paintings [unclear: of] considerable expressive power, even of beauty. [unclear: The] surprise may well have its origin in my own [unclear: ignorance], since I am not as well acquainted [unclear: with] Trusstrum's work as I should and would [unclear: like] to be. I had developed an idea of a painter [unclear: given] to violent and colour explosions of [unclear: taint] across large surfaces, of a latter-day [unclear: expressionism]. These paintings are not that, [unclear: though] there is evidence for it somewhere in [unclear: heir] ancestry. They bear witness rather to a [unclear: mood] of lyric intensity, tending in some works, [unclear: o] the kind of under-statement which will not [unclear: see] the paint obscure the surface it is painted [unclear: on]. It is a delicacy entirely appropriate to the [unclear: garden] world which is the ostensible subject of all [unclear: even] paintings.

[unclear: Really], the paint is handled very well; it is, [unclear: is] they say, interesting. 'Lavender Tree' has the tree itself taking up most of the foreground, the leaves and branches sparingly delineated to make a patterned loveliness in greens and greys; the house behind is worked in with more vigour and thicker paint, so it thrusts forward, holding the tension. The movement seems to be towards a flat surface of design, never quite reached, never far distant. Number 3 'Entrance' goes furtherest, yet even here we have the vaguely rectangular shape of a door sticking up, rather disconcertingly, to remind us we are still looking in. This latter is a beauty. It has an exotic feel about it I can't quite pin down—something of a Perisan carpet, or garden, something of Matisse—though a close look at the rather awkward shapes of trees and shrubs and trellisses and perhaps even an old car on its yellow ground, scarcely provides convincing evidence. Number 4, whose title I unfortunately cannot remember (it maybe Entering the Corridor'—it is the smallest painting there) shows how much can be achieved with an absolute economy of means. Leaves are thin, single brushstrokes, branches in thin lines of paint, each object is Indicated rather than defined and yet we get another mosaic pattern realised. Looking in to this one, there is a sense of mystery, a darkness to be gone through, with the light and air somehow behind, in the garden itself.

They are all paintings which benefit from closer acquaintance. The colour struck me first as a little dull and muddy, washed out. It is muted rather in the direction of harmony, the colours taking their place in the general scheme of the painting. The one painting where a big block of quid vivid yellow dominates the foreground. I found rather too brash, as if a subtle balance had been lost through lack of restraint. If there is one general criticism to he made, it is along these lines. The aim is somehow to juggle ordinary bric-a-brac of an ordinary garden into a relation where they express something rather less trivial—a state of affectionate yet intense delight, of intimate appreciation. I felt that at times the various elements resist encorporation or transmutation, as if their odd and clumsy contours could not manage the leap. Probably this comes back to the earlier point about the depth-surface tension. I mean to suggest that at some stage either the vision or the image(s) may have to give some ground. My inclination is too hope it is the image, what is out there, that comes nearer capitulation: but that is to forget that, in these paintings at least, it is the relation between the two, precisely, that gives the paintings their endearing magic.

Just across the way from Peter McLeavey's, at the Bett Duncan Galleries, there is an exhibition by a husband and wife team of Christchurch art teachers, (Gavin and Vivian Bishop) One would need to be generous indeed to search out some spology for the faded and tawdry surrealism the paintings exhibit. For the husband it is Arabian courtyards, peacocks and white towers, concubines and lilies and heron-like birds flying. Which images are delicately and professionally rendered, surpassingly pretty, completely incomprehensible. I know it is to move us somewhere else than in the eye of thinking mind; but whatever moves in my surgid depths remained unmoved on this occasion. This is a fashion of a couple of decades ago and even then it was never meant to fit so sweetly, so numbingly.

If shared idiom is a solid base, I would expect (though it is not my place to do so) the marriage to be a happy one. Her paintings centre on umbrellas and columns and arches and rainbows contrived into clever little icons, all suffused with a vagueness extending beyond the wash of the pastel colours. Again, the affect is pleasant and again, very little more. The images can stand, perhaps, only as derelict monuments to that particular cloudy, melanchuly so fondly embraced by ageing and adolescent romantics. Sweet and lost, deceitful.