Lost In Space

Painting is the most fleetingly pure of design processes. The works in Denys Watkins’ latest exhibition, Lost in Space, are a case in point; abstractions loosely based upon the notion of objects or landscapes, woven together with a distinctive brand of ritualistic liminality that is associated to the artist’s impressions of the modern world. In each of these works the artist is searching for a meaningful composition through the accumulated gestures of applying paint to convey various strata of visual information.

The sense of exploration in this manner of working carries with it an element of risk in that the composition is a goal pursued until a moment of resolution becomes apparent. In these works there is no ‘endgame’ other than an indefinable, sanguine moment of skilled reflection where the maker instinctively knows to stop. The painter Albert Oehlen describes the challenge; ‘I don’t think you can really, seriously—or philosophically—try to find out what it is that a painting does to you. It’s contradictory. You can’t come to an end because, if it’s good, it’s beautiful—everything that’s good will be at the end called beautiful. But I like very much if you do things that seem to be forbidden and seem to be impossible, like a test of courage.’ [ii]

Lost in Space, the title of the exhibition taken from a classic early sci-fi television programme, is a clue to what Watkins was feeling in the studio. While Watkins’ series is conceived as abstraction, the actual works are not entirely non-objective; figurative motifs and written words both make appearances. One of these motifs is a Moa bone from Auckland Museum while another is an assortment of simplified one-dimensional machine diagrams. These references are open to interpretation, but their respective typologies within the context of each composition and their cartoon inspired forms suggest a humorous yet critical and understandably dystopian view on the clumsy ascendance of humanity.

There are other compositional cues and references scattered through the series that perhaps bear similar implications while also defying obvious purposes. For instance, in Earth House Hold; Machine of Loving Grace, and, Coney Island of the Mind (all 2012), spoked discs delineated by coloured sections located within diagrammatic compositions bring to mind Duchamp’s The Chocolate Grinder No. 2 (1914), an infamous work of abstruse purpose initially intended as a study for his equally slippery early masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1925).

In Watkins’ Meat Science (2012), a humanoid-dog figure sits within an inset in the pictorial composition. Appearing to be propping up a large oval of what is conceivably its metaphorical obsession with meat, the creature appears in the landscape as a burdened individual bearing a picket sign featuring the word ‘HELP’. Art theorist, Charles Harrison, wrote: ‘Landscape might be a refuge from the would-be-urbane professionalism of Conceptual Art and its derivatives. But insofar as it can be made aggressive it is no place to hide, not from the conflicts of modernity, nor from the fear of violence, nor from the power of language.’ [iii]

Ultimately Watkins works are about painting, pure and simple. He describes the process of these works creation with a concision that confirms his years of experience as an artist, ‘Its a sort of tapestry of information, weaving in events and histories, and all determined by the way the paint goes down, then embellished to construct formal visual activity.’ [iv]  To employ Oehlen’s supposition, above, is it good, is it courageous? It is both.

Matt Blomeley, 11 September 2012

Lost in Space is an exhibition of Denys Watkins works at Bath Street Gallery, Parnell, Auckland (September 19 – October 13, 2012).