Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of James Cook sailing into the misnamed Poverty Bay in 1769, PAULNACHE hosted an exhibition by Gisborne-born artist, Peter Adsett.  In the gallery entrance is a series of ten paintings, collectively titled October, commemorating loss, which is a widely experienced response to the historic arrival of the British in the Tūranganui-a-Kiwa area.  

The main wall of the larger gallery has, meanwhile, been transformed into what the artist calls “the wall of erasure.”  It comprises black canvasses, which navigate their position amongst erased drawings and angled black cornices of pasted wallpaper.  

The title, October, is intended to evoke not just the events taking place this month around the first landing sites in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, but also Russian abstract painting from the time of the revolution.  The little diptych facing the viewer above the word October presents a (half hidden) black square, the ensign of Kasimir Malevich.  Adsett also refers to the influential art journal October, which has re-analysed art practices and debates of the last century in its pages, especially the fictional ‘death of painting.’  For Adsett, it is not painting that is moribund, but the capacity of many to understand it.  As art becomes spectacle, the viewer is rendered passive.  There is no requirement to think.

Constructed from the least number of elements - raw canvas, plus black, white and grey acrylic - the October works sit quietly against the wall like a selection of blank treatises.  The careful observer, studying the left-hand edge of each stretcher, will discover a pencilled date, nearly illegible, alluding to ten tragic events that were consequences of the early expeditions and settlement of the East coast.

The socio-political aspect of this exhibition is not intended to dominate the viewer’s appreciation.  Being abstract, and minimalist in their vocabulary, the works are not substitutes for a demonstration.  Rather, they provoke reflection on the nature of western painting practice.  For each one offers a subtle variation on the theme of ‘framing.’  In fact, the sole ‘figure’ in each work is a frame of some kind, one that does not fully complete its task, but sets up rivalry with lines that are also potential frames, be they black, white or grey.  The central section is raw canvas, which can remind you of sails or tents, if you like to dwell on the apparent theme.  For Adsett it also signifies the voiding of our ability to see the vast potential of painting in the period post Pollock.

In effect, textured canvas-weave is reduced to its materiality, taking its place alongside paint as another colour, or, more correctly, tone, in the meticulously structured whole.  The small diptych mentioned earlier serves as a key to unlock the series, offering not just a real frame in the form of a stretcher, but its reverse, complete with stapled canvas edge.  The raw guts of painting, one could say.  But sliding across from the other half is the face of painting, a black square, containing nothing and – if you see it as the symbol of abstraction – everything.  Adsett, who is always aware of the presence of Gordon Walters at his shoulder, calls it “the sliding door of perception.”  I would conjecture that he refers to both the history of painting, and the history of New Zealand settlement, which depending how they are framed, are simultaneously hidden and revealed.

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