Bad dreams

Part comic, science fiction and romantic vision, these are the works of Brendon Wilkinson being exhibited at Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History.

First the factual stuff about the exhibition Hexon Cusp. Decade by Brendon Wilkinson.

The exhibition runs at Aratoi in Masterton until March 23. It is the first public gallery exhibition by Wilkinson, who is an old boy of the town, schooled at Rathkeale College. Now, after a stint at art school, he's living in the Wairarapa again.

His work is in the collection of Te Papa and the Auckland City Gallery and his dealers are Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington ,and Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland – a pretty impressive start for an artist in his early 30s.

The Aratoi exhibition has a range of works, the earliest from 2001. There are watercolours, large oil paintings ( about 2-metres square) and sculptures.

But the more interesting stuff is what it looks like.

Wilkinson's work is typical of a generation of artists producing works that identify them and, to an extent, group them.

Two or three main themes run through his work. One is a portrayal of a sort of underground machine labyrinth of conduits and tunnels, vortexes and sci-fi effects. These are painted in dark purples with an overlaying of white.

The other is what I sum up as the "disturbed garden". They tend to contain Adam and Eve, or often just female figures, in green foliage, but with an added unpleasant atmosphere. One painting has coral growth making its way into the figure's nostril; another an array of creeping insects. Some show bodies opened so we can see their bones and into their organs.

They have a gothic feel, a modern-day pre-Raphaelite romance combined with a warped Beardsley – an attempt to be fresh and naive, taunting with imagery that seeks to disquiet.

The sculptural studies use model sets and feature tagged railway tracks, prison yards and decayed army bases (one with a dusty hill that covers a giant dead body).

It is in the watercolours, smooth and sensuous, that the artist shows his real skills in drawing. In the oils, as fantastical as the combinations, his paintwork isn't as masterful.

What the exhibition doesn't supply is text, possibly in the quest to be illusive, but probably because the intent of the works is mostly one of staging and atmosphere.

The title Hexon Cusp. Decade – the three words is all that is supplied by the artist.

Ten years of work, on the border of what? It becomes an anything/nothing thing, any firm meaning locked away in secret.

By Fran Dibble

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