Ralph Hotere’s Baby Iron

JANET PAUL

Janne Land's gallery is up a steep flight of stairs in an old wooden building which contains a fruit and vegetable market. The space is large and uncluttered, with a polished wood floor of a mottled brown, and white walls. Through dark rafters one sees, at intervals, the grey of corrugated fibre-glass. Ralph Hotere's exhibition accords well with this cool space. His eleven works gleam, effloresce, grow quietly grey. Polished stainless steel, corrugated vertically or solid-surfaced, is the support for ten of these works. Steel reflects the gold of the spotlight—its surface fleetingly changed by the coloured clothes of viewers as they move, so that a shocking-pink .line may dance across corrugations in one image, another be shadowed by areas of dark blue or lightened by a passing orange. Ralph Hotere's earlier works have suggested extensions of Malevich: responses to the question whether The Black Square was really the end of painting. Not at all: look, says Hotere's painting, here is a black surface! A uniform dark, you think? You must participate to absorb meaning. If you are willingly attentive the surface gives an image—a cross, a circle, a line of duller black, stencilled letters which form stripes of words: Malady, Melody, My lady . . . Hotere's black is primeval chaos fraught with life.

Painted words, words as painting, have been an enlivening individual element in New Zealand art since Colin McCahon's miraculous shock question And will Elias save him?'. When McCahon's paintings incorporating words were first shown, Rex Fairburn tried to dismiss them as 'lavatory graffiti'. They could not be dismissed: like a pittosporum which has seeded obstinately in a flower garden: they are there, unexpectedly appropriate, healthily growing. The few painters who use words as visual image inevitably suggest William Blake: poets and prophets speaking to heart and conscience. It is inevitable too, that any born after 1919 should stand comparison with Colin McCahon.

Ralph Hotere's handwriting is more stylized, less individual, his texts a lighter concordance for McCahon's grave Hebraic messages. Where McCahon has used the Bible, Hotere's source has often been the sympathetic wit, modesty, sparse elegance and enigmatic quirkiness of Bill Manhire's poetry. While both painters have used white marks on a black surface (which give a greater unity and a more immediate emotional response than the reverse) their difference is that Ralph Hotere has made the marks less personal. He has used an italic hand or has substituted stencilled capital letters, such as are used to mark woolpacks, or has organized surface contrast (shiny/dull) to make black on black just visible. Stencilled numbers, used both as graphic element and oblique message. are also part of Hotere's imagery: for instance the numbers nineteen to twenty-five, in the Sangro paintings refer to the ages, at death, of soldiers from the Maori Battalion buried on the Adriatic coast of Italy.

Hotere and McCahon, both worlds away from the emulative, competitive scramble of Art International fashions, are prophet painters who combine Western and Polynesian abstraction in a loving respect for this land which is their implicit strength. Ralph Hotere's subtle comment is elegant, polished, terse. His work, technically more adventurous and philosophically more political than McCahon's, stands to be read as carefully.

There are always references back in Hotere's work and many constants: a black base with red, white, brown, blue, unenclosed intervals of line, negative space to define pattern; layered drops of paint—black, brown, grey-white—sup-porting words stencilled or drawn. A sense of organic texture, of physical weathering, is united with the linear sophistication which is Hotere's hall-mark.

Ralph Hotere,
Baby Iron No. 8,
lacquer on stainless steel
and acrylic on hardboard

In this exhibition, Baby Iron, the works on steel have wide frames of weathered wood. No 1, titled on the work, Window in Spain, framed within the top of a double-hung window, encloses a smaller rectangle of corrugated steel bolted all round into a panel of black hardboard flecked at the top with brown. Here we first find the strangeness of the signs on the steel. They are not made with paint. Ralph Hotere has used another natural element. This time it is not rain but fire. When you l6ok at a flame, in a fire or a candle or even the gas jet, you see that colour is related to intensity of heat: red, yellow, blue and a bronze combining the red and the gold. In these works gesture and sign are made with an oxy-acetylene torch which traces on steel the colours and spaces of flame. Above the central sign (a vertical held between two shorter horizontals) there is a bronze blurr: the source of heat was more distant. As the painter has moved closer the heat has coloured more vividly his gestured marks; two crosses, flanking the central I, have a variegated sheen; in the centre an intense blue, a space of duller steel and an edge which is a rippling line of red/black/orange. Black acrylic paint, sprayed or brushed, is confined to two vertical scribbles on either side of the central form and to a series of small squares above the top horizontal. All this is unified and made more subtle by reflected light (very bright on the un-touched steel surface) deflected and altered by fine irregular scratches etched across the corrugations with an angle-grinder. These marks, under the flame-imaged colour, change from dull to brilliant as light catches on different surfaces with the viewer's own movement. Because this ground surface changes from highly reflective to dull, it, too, picks up, with varying degrees of resonance, the polished brown of the gallery floor, the white of its walls, the gold of its lights, stripes and flecks of adventitious colour. Nine of the other works are variations on this theme of dullness and reflections, of marks shining from apparently different depths. In no 3 words appear and disappear. Hotere has written with a burnishing tool unevenly dulling the surface with a flow of words:

A wind goes out over the fields
A shadow grows where I touch you
What is this distance?
Whose hand is quietly waving?

No. 5 is freely etched under a flamed St Andrew's cross. The bolts are not of steel, but head-drawn dots, a core of blue in a field of red, the cooler bronze edged with a dark flare. No. 7 is flame-drawn on a shining, unscratched surface: enigma-tic after-image of snakes/face/landscape/ harbour. It is for the viewer to read. Other works play paint, line and interval over the shiny or dulled surfaces. Where paint-brush-marks are given they are drawn into with the end of a brush so that even these lines are inscribed by absence, letters are not formed into words. The alphabet is stencilled in reverse as if the painter is saying 'here they are, all 26 of them, make your own words'.

In No. 8, light catches amazing layers of depth under vertical white lines forming a rectangle above a blurred flow of letters.

Ralph Hotere,
May 1983
(photograph by
Marti Friedlander)

No. 10, a black linear horizontal grid over a buffed surface, has ARAMOANA written backwards. Down in large capitals runs a line which may be read as IS ISNT and suggests the tensions of that unhappy manifestation of Big Thinking. Black scribbles are reminiscent of the elegantly defaced hoarding which announced the site of the Aramoana project. (That unexpected art work was part of a strong Dunedin protest against the proposed aluminium smelter.) No. 11 has a T-shaped cross of flame and thirteen bolts as if the final station of the cross is waiting to be finished: and may, indeed, be finished on the wooden frame.

Whether from a diet of reproductions or an innate Puritanism many New Zealand painters have abhorred paint texture. They have made surfaces as unmarked and impersonal as British Paints. In these works on steel Hotere has found an animating way to free the gesture with a poetic chemistry, allowing the flame to augment his marks and engage our spirit.
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