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Metaphysical Bling: Tony Lane
Tony Lane’s paintings evoke the immaterial and the metaphysical. MARK AMERY surveys two of his current exhibitions, Metafisica at Mark Hutchins Gallery and Practical Metaphysics at City Gallery Wellington.
"Pure Water", 2005
ART provides us with devotional objects. As everything around you changes, a favourite work of art can be a touchstone. Something that encourages personal meditation, a marker of memory and time, and a reminder of the qualities you hold faith in.
It’s in this way in the most domestic of settings that an artwork or collected object can be a treasured vessel for the metaphysical – those things of most value to us, but which have no other such eloquent physical expression.
It’s a role long played by art in public places of worship but also in the home. We find devotion through precious and sometimes seemingly ordinary objects. I have a painting above the stove in our kitchen I picked up off a guy some years ago selling his creations from out the back of his car at Nelson’s Market. Painted on the back of a frying pan, it’s of a man fishing, knee deep in dark water silhouetted against the dusky hills and lit clouds, the light fading fast.
Tony Lane’s paintings work over the ideas around expressing the immaterial. He provides objects of devotion and meditation, bringing the ceremonial to the domestic. Since the late 1980s Lane’s work has continually recycled familiar metaphysical icons as a visual language – hearts, wounds, veils, strings of pearls, stigmata – with the pomp and circumstance of ceremonial furnishings and a luminous dressing of imitation gold leaf, antique colours and beads. His paintings also represent the immaterial through their strong abstract play with light and vaporous apparitions: a cloud, tears, stains.
The familiarity of these devices means it’s easy to overstate the reverence in Lane’s work. Some of strongest work plays out a tension between art’s ordinary domestic setting and the immense metaphysical value of what it expresses. Lane’s paintings acknowledge that the wealthiest experiences often come during the most ordinary of actions, and there’s often a tension in artistic terms between the high and the folk.
Some of Lane’s best work is some of his most recent in the fine new solo exhibition at Mark Hutchins Gallery and the current City Gallery survey exhibition. I sense a new theatrical confidence and lightness of movement here in playing off banality and profundity, and the weighty and ornate with the celebratory and the downright quirky.
My favourite of Lane’s works are those where, without the slightest tinge of irony or debasement, he plays with the theatrical staging of the devotion, as if letting us in on the secrets behind the magic whilst still setting off fireworks for the mind. Lane’s play with art history reminds me of photographer Ben Cauchi’s play in magician’s tableau with the history of spirit photography.
"Table with Four Forks and a Spoon", 2006
In one work at Mark Hutchins a luminous pink table with inlaid turquoise beads provides the frame for a set of forks and a spoon to set off sharp angled refractions of light like searchlights into the night sky. In another at City Gallery those searchlights (or are they papal hats?) are turned on leafless trees with stigmata – like holes in them, which have the dark kooky cartoon feel of a younger painter like Saskia Leek.
When you first see Lane’s work both its singularity and its attachment to the past impresses upon you. Those who call Lane’s work old-fashioned are right to the extent that the language of devotion he uses is of greater relevance to his own established generation, and has an ornate bling of most interest to those with impressive houses to fill. This is art working at being gorgeous, on the edge of slipping into the gaudy. Yet within this seduction this is an artist subtly, intelligently recycling the historical in the contemporary.
Considering these two impressive exhibitions – once again Mark Hutchins rises to the challenge of complementing and adding to a major City Gallery show with his own – you see a sophisticated synthesis of a far-reaching set of artistic influences and aesthetics. Its abstract music (all staves, dots and quavers) is like a concertinaed map collapsing together the pre-Renaissance and pre-postmodern – a twisted Bill Hammond or Colin McCahon landscape base here, a Giotto or De Chirico object there. Lane has found his own space in which to explore art’s power to inspire devotion.
The medieval is the most pervasive and distinguishing influence of Lane’s work, but as much in spiritual philosophy as the aesthetics of the fresco. Indeed, the one disappointment in the City Gallery survey is a new large work, In Time Like Glass, which stages all of Lane’ s devotional iconography, but is washed of the power which sees in other work body made out of light.
Elsewhere however Lane reminds us of the power of illumination, echoing the Middle Ages’ creation of solidity through volumes of light, use of gold leaf and strong chromatic zones of colour.
Lane’s work reminds us that, across cultures God was seen as light. Scrolls, sometimes resembling speech bubbles or searchlights, are prominent throughout the Hutchins exhibition. Illuminated, they lie empty awaiting the words of devotion of the viewer.
Metafisica, Tony Lane, Mark Hutchins Gallery, until December 16
Practical Metaphysics, City Gallery, until January 28
"Pure Water", 2005
ART provides us with devotional objects. As everything around you changes, a favourite work of art can be a touchstone. Something that encourages personal meditation, a marker of memory and time, and a reminder of the qualities you hold faith in.
It’s in this way in the most domestic of settings that an artwork or collected object can be a treasured vessel for the metaphysical – those things of most value to us, but which have no other such eloquent physical expression.
It’s a role long played by art in public places of worship but also in the home. We find devotion through precious and sometimes seemingly ordinary objects. I have a painting above the stove in our kitchen I picked up off a guy some years ago selling his creations from out the back of his car at Nelson’s Market. Painted on the back of a frying pan, it’s of a man fishing, knee deep in dark water silhouetted against the dusky hills and lit clouds, the light fading fast.
Tony Lane’s paintings work over the ideas around expressing the immaterial. He provides objects of devotion and meditation, bringing the ceremonial to the domestic. Since the late 1980s Lane’s work has continually recycled familiar metaphysical icons as a visual language – hearts, wounds, veils, strings of pearls, stigmata – with the pomp and circumstance of ceremonial furnishings and a luminous dressing of imitation gold leaf, antique colours and beads. His paintings also represent the immaterial through their strong abstract play with light and vaporous apparitions: a cloud, tears, stains.
The familiarity of these devices means it’s easy to overstate the reverence in Lane’s work. Some of strongest work plays out a tension between art’s ordinary domestic setting and the immense metaphysical value of what it expresses. Lane’s paintings acknowledge that the wealthiest experiences often come during the most ordinary of actions, and there’s often a tension in artistic terms between the high and the folk.
Some of Lane’s best work is some of his most recent in the fine new solo exhibition at Mark Hutchins Gallery and the current City Gallery survey exhibition. I sense a new theatrical confidence and lightness of movement here in playing off banality and profundity, and the weighty and ornate with the celebratory and the downright quirky.
My favourite of Lane’s works are those where, without the slightest tinge of irony or debasement, he plays with the theatrical staging of the devotion, as if letting us in on the secrets behind the magic whilst still setting off fireworks for the mind. Lane’s play with art history reminds me of photographer Ben Cauchi’s play in magician’s tableau with the history of spirit photography.
"Table with Four Forks and a Spoon", 2006
In one work at Mark Hutchins a luminous pink table with inlaid turquoise beads provides the frame for a set of forks and a spoon to set off sharp angled refractions of light like searchlights into the night sky. In another at City Gallery those searchlights (or are they papal hats?) are turned on leafless trees with stigmata – like holes in them, which have the dark kooky cartoon feel of a younger painter like Saskia Leek.
When you first see Lane’s work both its singularity and its attachment to the past impresses upon you. Those who call Lane’s work old-fashioned are right to the extent that the language of devotion he uses is of greater relevance to his own established generation, and has an ornate bling of most interest to those with impressive houses to fill. This is art working at being gorgeous, on the edge of slipping into the gaudy. Yet within this seduction this is an artist subtly, intelligently recycling the historical in the contemporary.
Considering these two impressive exhibitions – once again Mark Hutchins rises to the challenge of complementing and adding to a major City Gallery show with his own – you see a sophisticated synthesis of a far-reaching set of artistic influences and aesthetics. Its abstract music (all staves, dots and quavers) is like a concertinaed map collapsing together the pre-Renaissance and pre-postmodern – a twisted Bill Hammond or Colin McCahon landscape base here, a Giotto or De Chirico object there. Lane has found his own space in which to explore art’s power to inspire devotion.
The medieval is the most pervasive and distinguishing influence of Lane’s work, but as much in spiritual philosophy as the aesthetics of the fresco. Indeed, the one disappointment in the City Gallery survey is a new large work, In Time Like Glass, which stages all of Lane’ s devotional iconography, but is washed of the power which sees in other work body made out of light.
Elsewhere however Lane reminds us of the power of illumination, echoing the Middle Ages’ creation of solidity through volumes of light, use of gold leaf and strong chromatic zones of colour.
Lane’s work reminds us that, across cultures God was seen as light. Scrolls, sometimes resembling speech bubbles or searchlights, are prominent throughout the Hutchins exhibition. Illuminated, they lie empty awaiting the words of devotion of the viewer.
Metafisica, Tony Lane, Mark Hutchins Gallery, until December 16
Practical Metaphysics, City Gallery, until January 28
Mark Amery's visual arts column courtesy of the Dominion Post, Friday November 24, 2006. Lumière will continue to reprint installments of Mark's column on a ongoing basis.
