In visual language, strong geometric shapes and directional lines provide us with graphic guides, most commonly seen in our urban environment as road signs and markings.
In the vast space of Two Rooms, ground floor gallery, a high tide line of terracotta brown evenly marks the walls, pillars and lower portion of Andrew Barber’s singular artwork.
His giant canvas is free-standing, like the sole remaining wall of a structure, and is made from squares of raw cotton sewn into a repeating diamond pattern. Above the high tide line, the surface is spattered and marked like a well-used drop sheet, while the wooden grid of stretcher bars is exposed on the reverse.
With the Anniversary Weekend and Cyclone Gabrielle floods in such recent memory, I can’t help but see this as a memorial to the devastation, the earthy brown wainscoting measuring the rise of silt-heavy water, now receded, having washed away all but a solitary, exposed panel.
The diamond pattern fabric hints at warning symbols, the surface stains and splatters echo the noise of panic, and the crusted texture below the waterline makes the obliterating deluge obvious.
In the gallery upstairs, the brilliantly coloured geometry of Robbie Fraser at first looks far removed from the organic processes of the world, and more aligned with direct graphic language. Sharp contrasts between saturated and desaturated colour, dark and light, raw surface and heavily layered paint, all draw initial attention to illusionistic space, hard-edged spaces that lunge forward from adjacent areas of soft retreat.
Closer inspection reveals the very human process that forms such abrupt shifts in surface. In almost secret places, paint tears away from a deeply cut line, two surfaces that abut firmly are suddenly separated by an incised chasm, pencil marks peek out from a blanket of paint. The artist deliberately undermines our assumption of perfect lines with traces of the labour required to build such slick geometry.
EVAN WOODRUFFE, Studio Art Supplies
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