Exhibitions
Auckland
DENYS TRUSSELL
NIGEL BROWN Bedrooms
Viewers used to more effervescent work may have found this exhibition too heavy and Gothic. I certainly didn't. I felt I was looking at the work of a very promising painter: one who has much to say, much of the unexpressed pain and secrecy in our lives to exorcise with his uncompromising imagery.
Nigel Brown's work is obviously influenced by Colin McCahon: the McCahon of the Maries at the Tomb. This influence is revealed by the styling of the figures, the angling of their heads, the almost earth-wave forms and rhythms of the blankets. As it happens, the influence here has been a good one - the basis of some strong statements that are Nigel Brown's own. He has begun to establish his identity.
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| GEORGE BALOGHY, Enigma Courtesy of Snaps Gallery |
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He is painting out some of the fundamental feeling of our lives. We are the children of matter, however much we succeed in rarefying our natures through the agency of spirit. Experience for us, then, has all the pre-determined limitations of matter, made more poignant by our spiritual consciousness. This dilemma in human experience resounds in Nigel Brown's painting. His figures manage to universalise the care, the pain, the love and the loneliness of human beings in the bedroom.
The bedroom is, though few of us care to admit it, the place in which the most imponderable bond of spirit and flesh is formed: the bond of human sexuality. To the moralist, it is either the pit of Satan or (if inhabited by a legally married couple) the chaste citadel of a snug family order; the point of origin of much revered money and property impulses amongst the population. This double standard creates an ugly perspective which is quite lacking in Nigel Brown's work. He is simply not that shallow. His bedrooms reveal the compassionate rather than the hypocritical aspect of the Christian tradition. He shows the continuing of the Christian notion of travail: a travail that works out its logic even in modern, hedonistic New Zealand.
There is pain in this work: the pang of travail. I would go further and say that these paintings express the ineluctable presence of original sin. By this I don't mean the original sin of the moralists who loathe life and its processes because of its imperfections. I mean, rather, the concept of original sin developed by those who, while feeling that human life is imperfect and blemished, accept it as a totality.
The women in the paintings have the lineaments of suffering as surely as any of the maternal sufferers of Catholic Europe. They travail despite the exotic backdrop of Northern New Zealand rain-forest seen persistently through the bedroom windows, and their travail is made explicit in the cruciform paintings, where the female figure is the axis of the crucifix.
The evidence that man continues to struggle and suffer deeply has a short but cogent history in New Zealand. It emerges in McCahon's painting, in Baxter's poetry. It insists on what New Zealanders don't like admitting to themselves: that life, their lives in particular, are not perfect merely because they have achieved material plenty. The belief that man can live by bread alone, and that New Zealand is a perfect society because it makes actual surpluses of bread, has caused a coma in sensibility here; a coma symbolised in the endless, comfy suburbs, the pastel-tinted, soft-quilted bedrooms, the emasculated trees, the manicured lawns.
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| RICHARD COLLINS If I can't wear my old Wrangler shirt I'm not going Courtesy of Snaps Gallery |
Nigel Brown's painting allows no such complacency. His bedrooms are elemental and austere, his colours rich and vibrant. His figures ache with the process of communion and the fact of loneliness. They contrast strongly with the bourgeois outlook, being raw to the point of pain and full to the point of poetry.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 3 December/January 1976-77