Calligraphic Hotere paintings excel

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34027, 16 December 1975, Page 5

Calligraphic Hotere paintings excel

The Brooke I Gifford Gallery, whose total available floor space has been extended by the addition of a small intimate print gallery, recently opened two new’ exhibitions. In the main gallery a col-i lection of paintings and’ monoprint drawings by! Ralph Hotere is being' shown, and in the secondi gallery are recent paintings! by Rosemary Campbell. Both exhibitions will close on December 19. They are the final exhibitions of the season in this gallery. The Christchurch public, have been fortunate ini seeing Hotere on three pre-'

vious occasions this year, two of which have been at the Brooke/Gifford. One of these was an exhibition of drawings, and the five paintings on canvas and the two in lacquer on hardboard now on view relate directly to those previous drawings. The two highly polished la-cquer-on-board works are typical of the Hotere we have come to know lately —[ immaculate surfaces with aj constantly varying sheen. Both include calligraphic' passages. In “Requiem L6”| it is verse in Maori, black! on black, which, never morel than partly distinguishable,! emerges and disappears,) while the emphatic lines re-i main. The acrylic-on-canvas j works are a rich series exe-j cuted in a tight colour! range, with only slight de-, viation from the matt black! ground colour, a marked contrast with the sheen and line colour of the. former works. The superbly satisfying symmetry of the Latin cross in “Requiem” (5) is to be found again in “Miserere Nobis” (Have pity on us), where a vertical pile of inscriptions, Miserere Nobis alternating with Kyrie Eleison, is weighed against a large expanse of plain blackstained canvas confined within a square of delicate red lines below a narrow relief formed top band. This, for me the finest work of Hotere’s seen for some tithe, is a delight in aesthetic gymnastics, supremely satisfying in its quiet compositional ploys. The drawing-prints, using the printed, the sprayed and the written word, from a poem “Pine” by Bill Manhire, are less interesting than those seen in thp nrp.vious drawing

show, although they, too, are executed with Hotere’s almost oriental delicacy and finely tuned judgment. Rosemary Campbell shows one or two portraits in a hot coloration of sharp colour, scratched and scumbled over equally sharp colour, and a series of small abstract works. These, suggestive of landforms, encrustations, lichens, and rocks, de- , mand and respond to close I examination. She plays off 'large forms against small, [ each built up with the same [treatment of overlaid [washes, overpainted impasto, (drawing lines which wander ; over and into paint. Here i she plays down the tempera- | ture of her colour by overpaying areas with saturated greys and neutral tones, allowing her small areas, her motifs, to emerge in contrasted richness and delicacy. When these become isolated, island-like, in a field of modulated colour (13, 22, 11) she is less successful. They float in a shallow space, unrelated to the support on which they are located. When connected to the edge (12, 23, 24 — the last two sensitively considered compositions with a pleasing distribution of forms, colour, and tone), or when the composition is more closely re- ' lated to the rectangular form |of the support (25, 26, 18) i she reveals herself an able, ! sensitive but modest min- | iaturist, producing micro- [ cosmic fantasies of a refined i sensibility — perhaps none I more so than “Grey Frag- , ments” (2), with its spidery, creeping black line on a grey ground enriched only in two small areas with -suggestions of pink. — T. L. Rodney Wilson