Exhibitions
Auckland
DENYS TRUSSELL
ROGER STAPLES Paintings and Drawings
Roger Staples has, with varying success, explored the New Zealand 'mentality'. Of course, it is unreal to speak of a New Zealand mentality as if there is only one. There are many. But as a nation we have a common problem: an ugly and graceless life-style. This derivative and industrialised colonial culture is the subject of a social comment. a literary approach which I think adds content to Staples' imagery.
Staples creates his comment by positioning in the natural vistas of New Zealand a small selection of man-made objects: objects suggesting an industrial (as distinct from a crafted) style of production. Broken beams of reinforced concrete, jagged fragments of bottles, the bland texture and colour of radiata pine joists are the centre-pieces in an environment of rocks, horizons, sands and sea.
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| ROGER STAPLES Landscape oil on canvas (Barrington Galleries) |
The junk-cluttered natural landscape is an everyday fact of our lives. But Staples' paintings have a resonance that goes deeper than social realism. They in fact could not be described as 'realistic' at all: their representational quality being dominated by the suggestion of a psychic interior. They are surreal, arid represent a frame of mind.
This is apparent in their colouring. Colour and light in them have a synthetic tinge: a quality of being 'thought' rather than literally seen. This is the quality of an interior mental environment, not an interpretation of the actual light in these islands. And the paintings are cryptic in their composition, cryptic in the manner that Magritte can be cryptic; though the silence and the psychic space in which their elements repose is not as devastating as the silence left us by Magritte.
The strongest pieces in this exhibition were a series, The Earth Series, five paintings in which the artist reveals the wounded soil. Here the tension between realistic and surrealistic levels of approach combined with good technique to produce strong images of erosion. It could be an inward erosion: a process of upheaval and destruction. But this erosion is also quite literal. We are looking at collapsing New Zealand land-forms eloquent of our long-lived habit of compulsive land-rape.
There were other paintings in the show that had strong formal qualities, in particular the Two Boulders. At times social comment becomes a little laboured and self-conscious. The painting At Onehunga is obvious to the point of being clumsy, but its comment remains a relevant one nevertheless.
Staples' drawings are strong in definition, interesting in conception, though at times a little repetitive in their texturing and detailing. They show a craftsman-like approach which, if developed, could be the basis of rich and variegated work. Staples, has something to say.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 7 August/September/October 1977