Art
The more, the merrier
by Sally Blundell
RECENT WORKS BY MARK BRAUNIAS, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch.
Kawehia painter Mark Braunias has long caught the front-on gaze of the looked at, the impersonal stare of the looker on. Using the comic form, he has drawn and painted the pathos of the little man, the disengaged, human forms abstracted into Disneyish shapes of wide-eyed self-consciousness. His latest Christchurch exhibition was the third part of a series of installations that has already crowded the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Wellington’s Peter McLeavey Gallery with the woebegone figures of the lonely, the sad, the desperately funny.
Here – in Biro, paint, shellac, computer wand and wood, evolving in cheerful fecundity out of canvas, paper, acetate, gallery wall – these figures fair romp around the gallery. They inhabit the space. They seem to feed on the space.
They? The comedians – the role players, the actors, the stars, the artists, all caught in the unblinking lens of the artist. The telling is fine – the self-conscious placing of the elbow on the bar, the overweight company man hurrying in his self-importance, the tacky driftwood families in their cheery formlessness, the round-eyed love-me gaze of the small moulded figures growing out of their upturned cans. Apologetic, always apologetic. Thin-skinned vulnerability, sad-eyed cluelessness, the guys who think they know it all, the losers who know they don’t.
There are the Jims and the Susans, the Girls for Free, the dumb arse workmates, the lonely first-time callers on all-night talkback. They are abstracted into line, colour and font, propped up on the easy phrases that say they’re OK: “I love Ringo”, “Who’s Who in Showbiz”, “Clive Simmons – 42 years (young!) today”.
The pathos is in the exclamation mark. They’re not OK.
“Yous have a beautiful mind” is written on the wall in bubbly 60s lettering, while below on taped A4 sheets is the walk, the paddle, the boot, the doleful straight-on stare. “The Whanau”, says another title in a loopy feelgood font, and below, the lonely profiles of Eleanor Rigby, Polythene Pam, the Queen. In a top 10 of the boxing ring, “Roaring Bill Hammond” sits at number one, “Julian Bad Boy Dashper” at number 10, Braunias’s superb figurative work taking the piss out of the hierarchies of art.
The most bitter irony usually comes from the most nervous. In these works the humour is black, the barbs sharp, but there is also a sense of fellow humanity. Braunias is there with his elbow on the bar, there holding a cup of tea on the cover of *** New Zealand (the word “Art” blacked out). He’s there with Yogi Jack and Clive, there cheering on “Ronnie Bonecrusher van Hout”.
For art – Art – is not exempt from the late-night attacks of painful self-regard. The art stars (painters and curators are among those mocked) have a self-consciousness exposed through these figurative works, but also manipulated by a largely abstract hand – the long drips of paint, the splattered shellac. The whole gallery is the canvas, an altered, animated environment in which the figure, the wall, the A4 pages – all are worked into form, colour, line and type, tracking the soft curves of perpetual self-correction: the careful ellipse of the hairline, the rounded Disneyish gaze, the half-finished line of abstract animation.
This is Braunias on life, on people, on art, on the comedy of tragic self-regard, the strut and stuff of contemporary
culture (with a dumb self-conscious “K”). Big, intelligent, compassionate works, funny, sad and humane. A myopic gaze on self-delusion, a land of glib identities, peopled with New Zealand’s beautiful losers.
