Exhibitions Wellington

NEIL ROWE

Tony Fomison

Visionaries are few and far between in these islands. Certainly a vision that is as consistent and as highly individual as that of Tony Fomison is rare indeed. Given that the nature of art is to imitate itself - to feed off and assimilate what has gone before - Fomison's achievement, seemingly without reference to the broader context of New Zealand painting or of recent art movements, is all the more remarkable.

TONY FOMISON
Detail from
Piero della Francesca's
'The Resurrection' 1970
oil on hessian, 400 x 310 mm.

The extent of this achievement is explicit for the first time in the touring survey-exhibition mounted by the Dowse Gallery. In the past, one-man shows by Fomison, notably at the Barry Lett and Elva Bett galleries, have provided a window on to the strange and eldritch world of the imagination that Fomison's paintings chart and delineate. Now it is possible to trace the development of his style and to see in context the growth of his themes and uniquely personal subject matter. Each painting and drawing seems like a detail from one massive work. Each is part of a continuing narrative. Even the copies from Bellini, Morales, Piero della Francesca, Ceruti and Holbein, from Roxburgh's Common Skin Diseases and various photographs, are grist to the Fomison mythology.

Christ himself, transposed from the paintings of the Renaissance masters, becomes an actor in Fomison's shadow-play, along with the clowns and jesters, beggars and victims of a variety of appalling diseases. There is a Goyaesque quality in Fomison's depictions of a suffering humanity and in the mirror he holds to mankind's misery, torment and despair. Man's inhumanity to himself is his constant preoccupation: but behind this essentially humanistic concern there is something else - something mysterious and malevolent shaping our destinies. There is no benign deity in Fomison's pantheon of looming supernatural beings. God for him is replaced by an obscene moron and mankind is the deity's plaything.

TONY FOMISON
Eating Pineapple 1971-4
pencil drawing
(Auckland City Art Gallery)

In this world the jester reigns supreme: the clown, the joker, the jack-in-the-box or, as he writes in a catalogue note, the soothsayer and truth-teller. This, one suspects, is the role Fomison chooses for himself: there is a marked similarity between the self-portraits and the physiognomy of the ubiquitous fool.

Certainly, there is something of the shaman and magician about him as he illuminates a strange twilit world of mazes, dark secrets, homunculi and grotesque beings which, while they are members of Fomison's singular eschatology, are, at the same time, uncannily familiar. It is this revelation of another coherent dimension, albeit allegorical, beneath the surface of everyday appearances that gives Tony Fomison's art its extraordinary power.