Down Into The Grid

Vavasour Godkin is a gallery that tends to specialise in minimalist abstraction and visual restraint. Only occasionally do recognisable images get presented, and that usually if some unusual creative process is involved – such as in for example, the photographs of Lisa Benson. This show, Fabrication, has as its theme the grid format - and the box shapes that function as modules and which can be pulled apart from it. The art practices of Noel Ivanoff and Monique Jansen make an intriguing combination. Jansen exhibits mainly etched works on paper this time but her earlier panelled paintings used to be more colourful. It is the same with Ivanoff, with only orange, white and yellow used apart from natural woodgrain. No blues or greens that he used in the past.

Of Jansen's etchings and drawings, the most exciting is a large image of a wire mesh with holes in it. However her most exhilarating contribution to the show in general is an unusual book of graph paper on a Perspex-covered plinth. It has thousands of tiny squares cut out of the centre of slightly larger, graph-paper units to create a delicate trellis effect. It is an extraordinary work, not so much because of Jansen’s obsessive labour but simply because it is mysterious. You can only examine the top two sheets, so to try and visualise what has been removed you need to carefully examine the scribbled handwriting and ruled biro grid-lines on these pages, and speculate from there.

The other artist, Noel Ivanoff, has been working with grids for some time now, using them as support structures behind panels. They were viewed through glass fronts overlaid with translucent film, this being imprinted with oil paint textures transferred from a previously painted companion panel. He also has used new wooden pallets on which he had fastened panels of immaculately laid paint. These he exhibited on the floor and the wall.

In this current show Ivanoff has a massive, six metre long, cedar stretcher positioned on the main wall. It is a much bigger version of Jansen’s paper trellises, and like his earlier glass/film works has a seemingly Japanese sensibility. 

On the floor he displays a suite of five beautifully made plywood and pine crates that you discover to be bottomless. Most are lined on their inner walls with painted mdf panels.

Not only is Ivanoff extending here a metaphor for portability (or nomadic mindset) that he seems to have developed with the pallets, but with these crates he looks at the notion of art enclosure and the hermeticism of the art world itself. These ‘crates’ could be gallery spaces. The orange and yellow, if taken as gallery walls, imply because of their saturation level, a claustrophobia one would need to escape from. They push the boundaries of what a painting might be through their mischievous construction because you can’t stand back to admire the painted planes from a distance, nor can you jump inside them to get a really close look. They are deliciously exasperating.

http://www.vavasourgodkin.co.nz/

Pictures from events associated with this article: